Jacki Weaver – Tripping Through Gateways

Veronica, Linda and Alice have lost their husbands in a tragedy. They discover their husbands were professional thieves. To add to their grief, they find their lives under siege, specifically from Jamal Manning. While he is running for public office, Manning is also a local crime lord…and it so happen’s the women’s husbands died stealing from him. He wants his money and gives them a month.

When she discovers her husband’s records of all her heists, Veronica brings the other widows together to try and complete the next heist that her husband had planned.

Widows is one of those movies that you don’t really get prepared for from the trailers. Most Heist films are heavily focused on the planning and the heist. Widows is more interested in setting up its characters. Everyone feels important. We walk with them as their lives intersect. This is to the film’s benefit. We get to really know everyone involved, both the heroes and villains of the tale.

Viola Davis gives a great performance as Veronica. She is both vulnerable and tough as nails. Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall play son and father of a political dynasty that are at each other throats. Daniel Kaluuya is riveting and immensely terrifying as Manning’s right hand man.

Director Steve McQueen makes some bold choices in the film (one sequence takes place within a car, and we only hear the actors as the camera stays outside, as the focuses on the car itself). The end result is a very compelling character film that happens to feature a heist. Managing some excellent surprises before it ends, I found Widows a very satisfying watch.

One day, the monsters arrived. People seem to be taken by a force and then kill themselves. If that sounds familiar, you actually remember 2008 M. Night Shyalaman film the Happening. That film had people committing violent suicides and people trying to flee the city and solve the mystery. The twist was that it was the trees that did us in.

Oh, sorry…spoilers.

The Happening is (for good reasons) not fondly remembered. It does have a couple very well done freaky moments. But it just becomes laughable.

Here, the problem is that…well…if you see the monsters…you are toast. And so, the only way to survive is to keep your eyes closed. For artist Malorie, this situation is even more troubling as she is pregnant.

Malorie soon joins a group of survivors in a house. Blocking the windows, they find themselves finding inventive ways to survive. But as the months tick by, they find that they must take bigger and bigger risks.

The film is focused on Malorie and her children and her detachment from life. The children are born after the event and simply named Boy and Girl. The three are trying to take a boat down river to a sanctuary. Using flashbacks, we get to see how the relationships within the house grow and break down…where trust becomes hard to come by.

The “keep your eyes closed” part is the most gimmicky, and yes, does evoke last year’s wonderful a Quiet Place. Unlike a Quiet Place, we do not share in the characters’ experience. With Bird Box, although there are a few brief moments seen through the blindfolds of characters, the camera remains in third person. Admittedly, forcing us to be blind whenever the characters are would get pretty obnoxious.

One of the really nice tricks is the film never tells us what the monsters are. We know people see them and then also seem to see loved ones… but we only see or hear the effects of their movement, not the creatures themselves. There are some really interesting artist renderings at one point, but really, who knows if this is really what the creatures look like or merely what the artists saw in their heads.

Bird Box is, thankfully, a much more effectively done take on a general idea like the Happening. The film has a really good cast and some really effective sequences.

On the day that they drop off their daughter for her senior year of college, Dan announces to Deanna that he has been cheating on her with another woman and wants a divorce. Broken hearted, Deanna decides to rectify her one big regret in life…that she quite college to marry Dan. She signs up at her daughters school (which is Deanna’s old school) to complete her archeology degree.

She runs into mean girls, makes friends with the girl’s in her daughter’s sorority and even strikes up a romance with a much younger guy.

The film relies pretty heavily on college movie tropes, but never does a lot of interesting things with them. The conflicts are mostly quickly resolved with very little impact. For example, the Mean Girls subplot runs through the entire film, it’s resolution is solved by a sentence and suddenly, those girls think Deanna and her friends are okay. Late in the film Deanna does something that hurts her daughter, and they get over it right away, since the action backfires on Deanna and threatens her education.

On the other hand, in spite of McCarthy playing Deanna as talkative and awkward, her daughter and the sorority sisters embrace her right away. And while played for humor, the relationship with fraternity guy Jack is actually kind of cute. They bond right away over wine and he genuinely likes her.

In spite of the film not really doing much with it’s tropes, I did get some laughs (Especially when McCarthy is sharing the screen with Rudolph). It is a pretty light comedy, and can be enjoyed on a lazy rainy afternoon.

Tag: Jacki Weaver

A Time For Grief, A Time for Theft (Widows, 2018)

What’s In the Box?! (Bird Box, 2018)

Back On Your Feet (Life of the Party, 2018)