Nosh 132: 'Widows,' Bertolucci, 'Can You Ever Forgive Me?'

David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Widows and Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Widows

In a brief prelude, director-writer Steve McQueen calls Widows his “passion project.” That reveals the movie’s double edge: a labor of love, long nurtured, but also a ramped-up commercial package. McQueen, whose grip on historical saga was acute (if drawn-out) in 12 Years a Slave, has made an absorbing thriller that uses an impressively tight cast in often superb locations. As a former Chicagoan (18 years), I think this may be the best Chicago display platform since The Untouchables (1987) and The Fugitive (1993).

Viola Davis, now 53, is a vulnerable, motivated action pivot as Veronica, suddenly cast into the deep. She lives in a lakefront Mies high-rise and adores husband Harry (Liam Neeson). He has the money, plus high connections on both sides of the law. Harry’s a thief. His crowning heist, of a rising South Side gangster, goes right but then fatally wrong. Widow Veronica is pushed hard for the stolen $2 million by the gangster’s sado-goon. Elevated from a 1983 TV series, the story is layered by writer Gillian Flynn as a deep-dish Chicago pizza of threat, fear and money-mad fatality.

The gang king Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) is running for alderman. This enrages the ward’s old, white-racist boss, Tom (Robert Duvall), who plans to bestow the seat on son Jack (Colin Farrell), a sleek opportunist but soon disgusted by dad’s fossilized corruption. Plot victuals include an on-the-make gospel preacher, an old bowling alley sharpie, the wanton police killing of a black youth, rude rap music (but also Nina Simone), Veronica’s endangered fluff-ball dog and a volcanic f-spew by Duvall.

Angry and desperate, Veronica takes charge. She recruits two other new widows and a zippy young street fox (Cythia Erivo), to stage a payback heist. Here, I think, McQueen slips a little. Powerhouse Viola Davis is left too often to simmer in mournful funk (fed by erotic flashbacks to Harry). Not enough textured fill is given to tall, Polish-American beauty Alice, a virtual high-rise unto herself, though Elizabeth Debicki is a wow widow (with aspects of Jennifer Lawrence, who passed on this film). Strong but under-used is action trouper Michelle Rodriguez as Linda, harried mom and widow. A surprise reveal comes around an hour in, not divulged here, but if you are hip to the ritual games of star-ego casting you might expect it.

Widows is a big, vivid tapestry with threaded debts to auteurs Tarantino, Scorsese, Mann, Russell, Coppola and Spike Lee. It isn’t a great heist movie, but McQueen crafts plenty of urban tension and crackle. His savvy is not too cynical, and his female empowerment zeal is (for a guy) nuanced. Softies won’t like the best sicko bowling alley scene since There Will Be Blood. But the fluffy pooch is a survivor.

   

  

Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Lee Israel wrote popular biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. By 1991 her failure with beauty stylist Estee Lauder led to Lee’s rejection by her editor. Lauder did zero for her. As played with acerbic pathos by Melissa McCarthy, in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she often looks (floppy mop of brown hair, bulging coats over bulky bod) like a rusted tank from the Maginot Line. But despair, marinated in booze, brings inspiration. Lee begins faking typed, signed notes by the famous, like Tallulah, Kate (Hepburn), Louise (Brooks) and Dorothy (Parker). Most are juiced by Lee’s tangy verve (“Caustic wit is my religion”), though foolish candor in a Noël Coward scribble would bring the law to her door. By then she had sold over 400 notes to New York dealers eager to be impressed (for profit).

McCarthy, a comical ace (who can forget her SNL spiking of Sean Spicer?), introduces Lee as a frumpy, sour, alcoholic loner, her lesbian lover long gone. She becomes a  rather endearing desperado. Forgery is her forge of income, and her flag of effrontery. It also leads to snarky mischief with gay rascal and bar barnacle Jack Hock. That would be England’s Richard E. Grant, in an old-rake extension of his breakthrough role as a hell-raiser in Withnail and I (1987). Sponger, cokehead, boy-cruiser, Jack is often a cultural dunce. It’s 1991, he’s around 60, but gay Jack doesn’t know that “Marlene” is the divine Mahr-lay-na Dietrich, idol of sophisticated gays for his entire youth. The two scampy scroungers flash some sparkle, accentuated by a classic song-track (Billie Holiday, Blossom Dearie and Dinah Washington were Lee’s nostalgia sirens of “a better time and place”).

Director Marielle Heller firmly hits notes both glum and bright, tucking McCarthy and Grant into intimate rhythms, hip but not campy. Fine support comes from three women: Dolly Wells as Lee’s most sympathetic buyer, Jane Curtin as her hard-baked editor, and Anna Deavere Smith as her unsentimental past lover. The film is a crusty munchie with soft insides, based on Lee’s acclaimed memoir (she died in 2014). With its wry, melancholy charm it joins the eccentric family of movies about New York dreamers and scrape-alongs: The Cruise, The Producers, Mac, Broadway Danny Rose, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Norman, A Fine Madness, They All Laughed, Midnight Cowboy, Joe Gould’s Secret and Next Stop, Greenwich Village. 

SALAD (A Memorial List) 

Bernardo Bertolucci died in Rome on Monday at 77. Perhaps the most inspired visual sensualist since Joseph von Sternberg, the daring director gave Italian style a new international luster and scooped up Oscars for The Last Emperor. He also provided Marlon Brando his last great role (Paul in Last Tango in Paris). Here, by my order of preference, are Bertolucci’s best: The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor (1987), Before the Revolution (1964), Luna (1979), Besieged (1995), 1900 (1976), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), The Dreamers (2003), The Sheltering Sky (1970).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Laurence Olivier sought to fire Orson Welles as director during their 1960 staging of Rhinoceros, quite some change after an earlier, fawning letter: “Darling boy (Welles was 44), I have wanted to pick you up and swing you round and dance you up and down on my knee and even go birds-nesting with you in some tiny measure, to show you how adorably sweet and generous was your dear thought.” The “dear thought” which sparked this effusion “was the loan of a refrigerator.” Olivier’s compliments often arrived like Shakespeare, drunk, falling into a fruit salad, although he (like Orson) offered many proofs of preferring women to darling boys. (Quotes from Philip Ziegler’s book Olivier.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Just before filming his splendid Philip Marlowe in his best film, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye in 1972, Elliott Gould’s star value “suddenly shrank. The breakup with Barbra Streisand and drug use (acid etc.) left him raw (‘I didn’t have a drug problem, I had a reality problem’). He absented himself from A Glimpse of Tiger, Warners shut it down, and Gould paid a big forfeit penalty. At least he had his name back: ‘What really got me down was the loss of my second name – I was either Mr. Streisand or Elliott Who?’ But Altman’s movie was a karmic rebound, and came on good wheels: Gould owned the 1948 Lincoln driven by Marlowe.” (Quote from the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Jean-Louis Trintignant is sexy fascist Marcello in the swooningly stylized The Conformist (Mars Film, 1970; director Bernardo Bertolucci, photography by Vittorio Storaro).

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