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 (090321)
Black Widow is, on balance, a largely blank experience: devoid of anything
particularly obnoxious other than a 133-minute running time that it seems to
view as an obligation rather than an opportunity for expansive storytelling,
pretty formulaic in every single element of its storytelling, packed with hollow
action scenes that don't hurt to watch, nor do they offer surprises or delights.
It is perhaps the single most mediocre film of the now-24 features making up the
Marvel Cinematic Universe: some of them have offered more to actively hate (Thor:
The Dark World,
Captain Marvel),
some have lurched more erratically between their highs and lows (Avengers:
Endgame), but none have nestled into such a cozy level of unmemorable yet
proficient blockbuster filmmaking for so many minutes at a time.
Granting all of that, the film does have one strength that no MCU entry has had
in a good long while, something I wasn't expecting at all: good character
scenes. Not scenes where brightly-defined personalities ping off each other like
particles in a super-collider built of quippy one-liners, but actual moments of
tiny human-sized drama between figures who struggle with interior conflict and
silently maneuver their way around exterior conflict, often expressed in the
actors' body language - in the way they are positioned relative to each other
and the camera. In fact, being human-sized is the most persistent strength of
Black Widow, which feels like it takes place at a self-contained level involving
stakes that are mostly concerned with the characters we see in the film and not
The Entire World, something not really true of any 2010s MCU films other than
Ant-Man in 2015 and
Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018. It gives the film a nice
throwback feeling to an earlier age of rougher, scruffier popcorn action
thrillers that were more about heroes punching their way across rooms than about
kaleidoscopes of shiny-as-shit computer graphics making humans look as
weightless as dry leaves. Which, to be clear, Black Widow has in abundance,
crowded mostly into its long act, which like most Marvel films finds the film
descending into a banal, choppy hell of un-engaging set-pieces.
Anyway, character scenes. Black Widow has something else that's not so common
for an MCU film: an honest-to-god film director. At the very least, Cate
Shortland has 2012's Lore to her name, a sturdy and subtle character drama, and
I have heard only good things about her 2004 debut, Somersault. That translates
into an unusually strong human element, present right from the opening scene, an
unexpectedly modest and subdued flashback to 1995, in a fuzzy vision of suburban
Ohio at dusk. Here we meet a fake family of Russian spies: Alexei (David Harbour),
Melina (Rachel Weisz), and little orphan daughters Natasha (Ever Anderson) and
Yelena (Violet McGraw). As that suggests, by the time the prologue is done,
they've been obliged to flee the United States for the motherland, having been
found out by the Feds after completing their top-secret mission, but in the
opening moments, Black Widow quickly paints Melina's relationship with the girls
with a sweetness and nostalgic warmth that feels miles removed from the stuff of
a big-budget summer tent pole. The light shimmers in soft focus, the handheld
camera bobs around gently, and it's just a nice human moment.
This being an action movie, that obviously doesn't last; in fact, it is cut off
rather brutally by a genuinely atrocious opening credits sequence that creates a
sloppy montage of contemporary history, both real and comic book, set to a
diabolically bad cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Malia J, one of those
glacially slow and moody rock covers that feel like they had passed into parody
at least five years ago. Why "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? For no reason I can
discern other than "The '90s", which speaks to the approximate level of soulless
witlessness that will mark the next 40 minutes of Black Widow. It's 2016, and a
now grown-up Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), former Russian assassin turned
American superhero and member of the Avengers, is trying to figure out what to
do in the wake of
Captain America: Civil War. This is not the plot, at all; in
fact, Black Widow is thankfully light on connections to the greater franchise,
focused instead on how the now grown-up Yelena (Florence Pugh) pulls Natasha
back in to the old life, so that the two not-sisters can help break the
brainwashing control over all of the Widows, turned into pliable sexy lady spies
by Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who is probably not nearly as dead as Natasha
supposes him to be. For the first long stretch of the movie, this mostly just
consists of nonsensical action scenes, some of the most exhaustingly bland and
badly-edited in franchise history; if there are any flashes of life to it at
all, they are due almost exclusively to Pugh, whose thick cartoon Russian accent
and mumble-mouthed delivery of cynical one-liners, more snotty than funny as
such, are clearly the film's strongest element.
Then, around 50 minutes in, Natasha and Yelena stage a prison break-out to
rescue Alexei, now sporting a massive frazzled beard and hefty potbelly, in the
hopes that their much-despised fake dad can point them in the direction of
Dreykov. And once this happens, Black Widow more or less forgets that it's a
comic book action movie for some 20 or 30 magical minutes, instead turning into
a loopy travesty of a family sitcom, with Alexei, and shortly thereafter Melina,
beaming with parental pride at the two little girls who hate their guts and the
grisly destruction of mind and body that their "parents" put them through. It
certainly doesn't hurt that between them, Weisz, Harbour, and Pugh are giving
three of the best performances in any Marvel movie; Weisz is horribly
under-used, no surprise there, but there's still enough of her and her own
cartoon Russian accent to grace the film with both a bleak sense of dark humor
and the charmingly fucked family love she pours into her scenes. Harbour,
meanwhile, gets an actual role to play, more broadly comic (and it's pretty
shticky comedy), but with its own little kernel of robust paternal enthusiasm.
And Pugh is just all-round great in her deadpan underplaying. It's kind of a big
shame that Johansson, finally getting her first solo vehicle as Black Widow (and
presumably her last) after seven appearances as an ensemble player, should be so
thoroughly trounced by her co-stars; despite all the press conference hype about
how much she wanted to make this work and how glad she was to wait to get it
right, Johansson is pretty obviously tired as she lifelessly scowls through the
one note she has latched onto.
Still, even with a tonally flat performance at its core, Black Widow manages to
get a full half-hour of genuinely nice character material, played simple and
without being overloaded by the snarky insincerity that is the hallmark of the
MCU. That's quite a lot for any comic book movie, let alone one in this uniquely
machine-produced, extruded-plastic series. It leaves about 100 minutes of pretty
generic action filmmaking, to be sure, and some of the de rigueur
explosions-and-floating-shit material at the climax is especially ugly-looking
in its digital slickness, this time around. It's clear this wants to be a tough,
physically-grounded exercise in brutal (for PG-13) hand-to-hand combat, except
that it simply doesn't have the know-how to carry that off; but the impulse is
appreciated. And the fact that there's any humanity to be extracted from the
boring crush of visual noise and cluttered storytelling is a nice, unexpected
treat.
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