While the United States Senate was debating the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in Washington DC, the trial of a century was happening in Chicago. A court jury was set to rule on the future of former police officer Jason Van Dyke, on trial for killing 17-year-old Laquan Mcdonald. This case, three years in the making, distinguished itself from the many other instances in which policemen have killed Black men in America in two ways. First, video footage of the incident was withheld from public release by the city’s governance, who dodged Freedom of Information Requests until a court judge ordered its publication over a year later. Then, secondly, Van Dyke was actually convicted of second-degree murder by the jury, unlike the officers involved in the deaths of Eric Garner (selling cigarettes), Philando Castile (driving a car with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter), and Tamir Rice (playing with a toy gun at twelve years old).
Widows, Steve McQueen’s latest feature about a group of bereaved women setting out to finish a heist initially planned by their late husbands, takes place in the chequered political landscape of modern-day Chicago, and touches on these very themes of corrupt politicians, police violence, and elite decline. When a heist led by driver Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) results in the crew and their getaway vehicle going up in flames, his wife Veronica (Viola Davis) is approached by local gangsters the Manning brothers and required to pay back the two million dollars he stole. Stuck between a rock and a hard place – in spite of her flashy lifestyle, she does not have much money of her own – she decides to carry out the heist that Harry had been planning by enlisting the widows of his former crew: hardened Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a shopkeeper who has had her store taken from her by her husband’s dubious creditors, and young Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) who has turned to finding a sugar daddy to bring in some income. A local hairdresser, Belle (Cynthia Erivo) completes the team as the driver. The plan is to steal five million dollars. Veronica can then pay off Harry’s debt to the Mannings, and the crew will then split the rest. They just need to find a getaway van, weapons, and the actual location of the unlabelled blueprint found in Harry’s notes.
Alongside this classic cut-and-dry heist story is a subplot on local Chicago politics that lives up to the city’s real-life reputation as the most corrupt city in America. Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), in addition to hustling Veronica to pay up, is also running for alderman of Chicago’s 18th ward. He is the up-and-coming Black challenger to the latest scion of the white, wealthy Mulligan family, the smarmy Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who is helped by his politician father Tom (Robert Duvall) in their bid to continue Mulligan’s decades-long hold over Chicago politics. And while all the posters and PR-sanctioned campaigns trumpet the language of a forward-facing and racially progressive yuppie optimism, it’s clear that this is only a mask for the naked pursuit of power. Obama’s HOPE posters line the street where another unarmed Black man is shot to death by a cop. An almost satirically appropriative initiative, ‘Minority Women Owned Work’ turns out to be yet another way the Mulligan family extracts wealth from the Black, working-class community that they ostensibly serve, under the guise of providing ‘economic opportunities’. “Can I get an M.W.O.W?” bleats Jack Mulligan from a stage at local rally, purposefully surrounded by Black women as visual testaments to his good politics. And don’t expect the Jamal Manning to be any Obama-like patron saint of the liberal imagination.“I want his fucking life” Jamal replies when his brother, the steely gang enforcer Jatemme Manning (Daniel Kaluuya) asks him why he wants to go into politics; all the off-the-table cash that can be made through construction deals and kickbacks.
In this muscular world of mutual corruption, swindling and violence, what’s a broken-hearted woman to do? What brings Veronica, Linda and Alice together is a sense of helplessness borne out of the emotional and material pain that comes with the death of their husbands. This is not some faux-empowerment story dressed up in infantilising ‘girl power’ credo; Widows is unapologetically honest about the way in which these women have come to depend on the men in their lives, and what desperate, bloody work it is to unleash their personal narratives from those of their husbands. It doesn’t, moreover, locate in this dependency a moral weakness or failing – it’s just the bare fact of their lives. Neither does the film trumpet a celebration of the inherent benevolence of sisterhood, often as condescending as it is well-meaning. “We have to be professionals,” Veronica snaps at Alice and Linda, taking on the mantle of an austere and commanding boss who is often short, dismissive, and abusive towards her underlings. There’s no time to play nice. Jamal and Jatemme Manning wheel and deal across congregation churches in Chicago and unscrupulous dive bars, the Mulligan family talk shop at the city’s most elite members clubs, but these women are fighting for their lives. Unscrupulous men run this world: they gamify what is sacred, take politics as a mere opportunity for self-enrichment, and treat their wives as easily disposable, mere extensions of themselves. And when they are gone, it’s their widows who have to clean up the mess.
Widows occasionally suffers from a plot too eager to hurtle to its logical conclusion to do its characters justice. It’s also difficult to place tonally, tottering the line between a gritty self-serious to parodic satire. But what it does offer is a clear-eyed gaze on the inevitable corruption of power, the blunt statement that your elites will not save you. Minority ‘empowerment’ schemes are driven by racist dinosaurs only interested in extracting your wealth. There is no well-dressed, Black yuppie politician who will, through the sheer force of his conviction, absolve America of its racist past. And your husbands will fuck you over. Look to the world, and the betrayals continue: a former frat boy facing multiple accusations of sexual assault will become one of the most important judicial voices in the nation today; unarmed Black men will be gunned down by policemen who get off scot-free; women will be thrown under by men – even the most ‘feminist’ – who confuse accountability with oppression. Acceptance is the first step to the path to survival. And then we get to cleaning the mess.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
