well, i saw widows last night and i’m all fucked-up about it today!
it wasn’t ~bad. in fact objectively i think it was very good in terms of script, direction, acting, pacing, all of that.
the simplest explanation is that i thought it was going to be my kind of movie, and it wasn’t. last year tumblr user hotelsongs looked me deep in the eyes and informed me, extremely correctly, that my ideal genre is COZY CRIME. widows is not cozy crime! widows is a grim, gritty, literary character exploration wrapped up in violent race/class/gentrification/organized crime drama, with a heist as a point of reference. my parents saw it before i did and enjoyed it, which was in retrospect a very clear red flag, though i was too hopeful to admit it.
what i WANTED was an energetic, if dark, heist, in which the husbands are swiftly, lovingly fridged, and the wives end up having a nice vindicating bisexual misandrist time.
anyway, four of us saw it together. two of us didn’t care for it, and two of us liked it quite a bit. i still need a little exorcism, so under the cut are spoilers and things i wish i’d been warned about. trigger warnings up the wazoo.
0. lots of gun violence. and knife violence. violence in general that was more intimate and explicit then i generally care for.
1. someone did warn me about this, actually, THANK YOU RIVER, but: there is a dog! the dog is at one point threatened in a really upsetting way! the dog DOES NOT DIE and in fact is important.
2. a paraplegic person in a wheelchair gets dumped onto the ground, threatened, mocked and tortured! he doesn’t die but it was fucking horrible.
3. in a flashback, liam neeson and viola davis’ beautiful biracial black son is pulled over by the cops, shot and killed for being black while driving a nice car. i personally found this extra stressful because we knew he was going to die, and at first i thought he’d get himself into a wreck for driving and talking on his cell at the same time, and the whole sequence got drawn out and ended way worse than i thought it was going to! so.
4. if, like me, you were really looking forward to liam neeson and viola davis being in an extremely attractive, loving, mutually respectful interracial relationship, and you were nobly resigned to liam neeson’s death-by-fridging and viola davis using her love and grief for revenge and character development, i gotta tell you, this is not the hot dignified interracial relationship you’ve been waiting for all your life that you deserve.
5. there’s some pretty unhappy, humiliating sex work, including a grim transactional sex scene i don’t actually agree elizabeth debicki had to be topless for.
6. colin farrell doesn’t die, and i’m mad about it.
7. white people using the ‘n’ word makes me unhappy even when cinematically speaking i get that there was a point to it.
THINGS THAT WERE GOOD:
a. lots of men do die, and 85% of them really had it coming, so that was nice.
b. the last... 30 seconds are good, gay and hopeful.
c. CYNTHIA ERIVO
d. the hypocrisy of white politicians in black neighborhoods is like. really illuminated. nowhere to hide, bitches.
so... yeah. there were bits that were funny. all of the acting was very, very good, the women especially! viola davis is not unlike batman in this and at one point appears without warning, stroking her little white dog like she’s doctor evil and making grim pronouncements.
so i didn’t completely not-enjoy myself! i have just been reminded why i don’t like not-fun movies -- i don’t feel like i’ve been ~moved or like i’ve ~learned something or gained ~insight anywhere, i’ve just got a miasma of unhappiness and resignation clinging to me and dragging me down all this morning, so tonight i’ve gotta go home, make some annie’s mac and cheese for dinner, and watch new!macgyver until i cheer up a little.
i’m glad i put my money here, because i want viola davis to have nice things, but. overall a negative. i’m too delicate for this.
