Black Widow

Title: Black Widow
Directed by: Cate Shortland
Written by: Eric Pearson
Network: Disney+
 

Yup, finally got around to watching White Actress, the movie that launched a thousand lawsuits, once it became free—well, no additional cost, whatever, shut up—to us cheapskate Disney+ subscribers unwilling to shell out $30 to watch it alone on our iPads.

Eh, by this point I’d waited around two years to see this, not like another few months was going to make much of a difference. I’ve already missed whatever cultural moment this movie might have had, and I don’t think it really every had much of one, other than people’s morbid curiosity about its box office numbers and the current schadenfreude over the Mouse getting fucked over by the talent, for a change.

So with the incredible timeliness and cultural impact that could only be achieved by a Blogspot site written by a middle-aged white man, here are my thoughts.

“Opinion without insight is worthless”, or so they say and they’re probably right, so with that in mind …

Fuck.

Like having no impact, no audience and no relevance has ever stopped me before. On with the show. More content! More! MORE!

My overall impression is the movie hamstrings itself by trying to do too many things at once. There’s some genuinely nice interpersonal drama about a fucked-up family kinda sorta learning to forgive one another and reconcile, but there’s also this whole other storyline about the exploitation of women that doesn’t quite link to the family drama, then there’s a kind of dealing-with-guilt thing CMYK 0/0/0/100 Woman Whose Husband Has Died is supposedly going through, all of which has to be squeezed in between cheesy CGI slugfests.

The family business is easily the strongest, as it’s the most developed, gets the most screen time, is the most concrete and as a result, hits hardest. Turns out Female Venomous Spider used to live Stateside as a kid, in a fake family that was part of the deep cover identities of two Russian agents. She has a happy life until their cover gets blown and they have to fly a Cessna from Ohio to Cuba, and no that doesn’t make much sense to me or anybody else who knows anything about geography. On landing in Cuba, the mission over and her usefulness at an end, ScarJo and sister Florence Pugh are promptly discarded by the people she had come to regard as her parents and the two girls are recycled for training as assassins.

The tangled feelings here are some of the best character work Marvel has ever done, which is a low bar for a property mainly about punching things, but still. Florence resents ScarJo for getting out and escaping to the West without ever trying to get her out, or even see if she was okay. They both hate foster-dad Red Guardian (Dave Harbour), an ageing, insensitive, sloppily sentimental and self-centered has-been interested only in war stories about his glory days. Meanwhile scientist mom Malena (Rachel Weisz) is a cold fish who can’t admit, even to herself, that these people matter to her. There’s a nice conversation between Flo and ScarJo beginning to bond over beers, then a dinner scene where all these old feelings come bubbling to the surface that is just the chef’s kiss, topped with a nice cherry of a bit between Dave and Flo where a Homer-esque Red Guardian reveals the soft side beneath his loutish exterior.

But that’s promptly interrupted by an action sequence.

They all have to go galloping off to take down the “Red Room”, a secret aerial facility where young orphan or homeless girls are turned into killers by a creepily Harvey Weinstein-esque dude named Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Giving Marvel’s most prominent female character a #MeToo moment isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but it doesn’t connect with any of the family stuff we’ve just been immersed in.

It’s not an issue that really gets shown to us, other than the odd choice of having a slowed-down, female vocal version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” play over scenes of Nat’s indoctrination into the Red Room and I love this song, man, haven’t listened to it in ages, but love it, had to go back and listen to the whole album again, I remember everybody in class getting excited when one kid came back with a copy of “Nevermind” the day it was released and there was me wondering what tf everybody was losing their minds over and I later found that same kid became like a Jesuit or something, man, life’s paths are weird and ANYWAY, much as this song hits all my nostalgia buttons, let’s admit the lyrics are so very, very not about women’s oppression, "Here we are now, entertain us" is in no way, shape or form a call to action about anything and neither is most of this movie.

To complicate matters more, we learn through disjointed and vague flashbacks that part of the deal for ScarJo becoming an Avenger was to try to kill Dreykov with a bomb, only the bomb not only failed to kill Dreykov, it also mutilated his daughter (Olga Kurylenko and there’s something odd about casting a model-beautiful woman as a scarred burn victim, but hey, it’s cool that Olga is getting to do all these roles). The movie never actually shows us any of this, maybe because they worried it would make ScarJo a little too unlikeable, or else it was a late addition to the story and there was no footage.

In any event, the total lack of dramatization other than ScarJo looking a bit mournful for a few seconds means the whole overcoming guilt thing adds nothing to the story other than a mild sense of confusion as to why it was included at all.

In that sense, it is better than the victimization of women angle, as this relies on a series of out-there-even-by-Marvel’s-standards bullshit plot devices, pheromone lock anyone, overdone CGI and an unconvincing henchman whose superpower is kind of lame: The Taskmaster is supposed to be able to mimic the fighting styles of anyone she sees, but all this means is she strikes one or two poses—poses the movie goes out of its way to make fun of in two other scenes, neatly undermining any sense of threat.

The best things here are Harbour and Pugh, the first because washed-out superhero dad isn’t something Marvel has ever tried to do before so it’s a refreshing change, the second because her character is just the right shade of Deadpool self-aware while also being the emotional core of the story. Doesn’t hurt that Pugh is just button cute and fun to watch in every scene.

Black Widow is the least super of the Avengers superheroes (c’mon, even Hawkeye has a bow) so this movie could easily have been more of a slick spy story in the vein of “Atomic Blonde” or “Salt”. It absolutely isn’t and the over-the-top Marvelly bits jar strangely with the very down to earth reconnecting with your past bits.

I think focusing on family would have made a nice capstone to the character and to ScarJo’s run in the MCU. I’m not one who thinks there’s no relevancy to this movie just because we know the character gets killed off in movie that came out earlier but supposedly takes place later, I mean Jesus people, “Titanic” made over a billion at the box office, not like anybody was exactly shocked how that one turned out. Still, they could have leaned into the dramatic irony a little more, maybe giving us more of a signpost as to how this character came to feel that the world was worth sacrificing her life for.

This movie had a veritable Lord of the Rings plethora of endings as they tried to tie up the family thing, the family thing again, the guilt over the past thing and the exploited girls thing, AND the setup for “Avengers End Game” thing AND the setup for Flo’s ongoing role in the MCU and yet … and yet they never give us a satisfying goodbye to Natasha.

They come close. There’s one shot of her looking into the sunset, determined, steeled, ready to do what needs to be done. That might have done it. But then we get ScarJo in a blond wig saying goodbye to some dude we, the audience, barely know, with a flip line about having two families. It’s more her fixer’s big moment than hers, really.

And with that she CGI flies into the sunset. A kind of flippant goodbye that serves as an appropriate commentary on her throwaway role in the series, maybe, but not exactly a rousing climax to a decade of movies.