It's Black Friday, and you know what that means: I'm watching Black Widow. (Ed. Note: it meaning that is contingent on the author noticing that it's Black Friday, which is not an annual occurrence.) It's long been a favorite of mine for reasons not entirely related to its being a good movie. There are, after all, as I've indirectly alluded to in the past and will hereby define for posterity, four categories of movies:
1—Good movies that are fun to watch: Wherein you find pictures like (and as diverse as) The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, David Lean epics, early Godard, German Expressionist silents, Sholay, etc etc etc. Self-explanatory.
2—Good movies that aren't so much fun to watch: The kind of thing that set off that “cultural vegetables” shitstorm. The thing that rubbed me wrong about that piece wasn't so much that it dared to insult master filmmakers who like their imagery oblique and their pace deliberate (like Tarkovsky, notably), but that calling difficult art “cultural vegetables” ignores how fucking rad spinach and broccoli and so forth are when you cook them right, and it's a little insulting to vegans (“what the fuck are we, chopped soy liver?”; I just had a good time kickin' it with my vegan cousin at Thanksgiving the other day, I don't want some nekulturny fuckball indirectly insulting her) but whatever, it was a cute phrase that succeeded in pissing a lot of people off. Not the point. What is, is that not every good movie is all that easy to watch. Some movies are challenging. Tarkovsky made a bunch like that, Lars von Trier made one or two, a lot of experimental and/or politically-motivated filmmakers do, some (like Lars) deliberately make their pictures upsetting to the audience to make a point. I throw a lot of tearjerkers into this category as well, because crying sucks under the wrong circumstances.
3—Bad movies that aren't fun to watch: What I like to call “movies that could have been good if they didn't suck,” which sounds like me being a retard, but is really just a colloquialism for a picture that was sunk by poor execution, factor into this category in a big way. Also, utterly venal pieces of shit like every movie Adam Sandler has made since about 2002, assembly-line rom-coms built around the premise that lying is the stuff of madcap comedy, and movies that mistake a “message” for an excuse to not make a good movie. However, not all bad movies fit under this category, as there plenty of . . .
4—Bad movies that are fun to watch: Now we're cookin' with gas. Low-budget genre pictures, spectacular failures by horribly misguided directors, and the ol' “let's make a mountain of cocaine the size of Kilimanjaro and then rail it all over the course of principal photography” romp, all of these and more fall under this category, which some—not me, though, I'm still partial to 1—regard as the most fun of all four. I do think that more movies fall under this category than any other, if only because I love movies to an extent that I enjoy a lot of things even if they're not “good” by most generally accepted metrics, and will often let the things I like about a movie outweigh the things I don't. Such is the case with Black Widow.
Black Widow isn't a bad movie, exactly, but it isn't what a lot of people would immediately think of as being good, either. For one thing, it's a preposterous scenario, with (essentially) unmotivated villainy, and a resolution with enough moving parts that if you stop to think about it for a second, you're like “wait a minute, get the fuck outta here . . .” And yet, Black Widow is awesome.
There's a whooooole lotta talent involved in Black Widow. It was about the third “comeback” picture for director Bob Rafelson, among whose credits as a director and producer in the late 60s and early 70s are a number of all-time classics, though he'd later meet with some bad luck, which was not entirely not his fault. The great Conrad Hall was the DP (and the picture, as one might expect, looks gorgeous). It was written by Ronald Bass, who would go on to become an Oscar winner. The supporting cast, in relatively small roles, has people like Dennis Hopper, Lois Smith, Diane Ladd, Terry O'Quinn, Nicol Williamson, James Hong, and Sami Frey. And its leads are the magnificent Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.
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| Theresa Russell (left), sexual tension (center), Debra Winger (right) |
Its story (spoiler warning) is good trashy pulp fun: Theresa Russell (second spoiler warning) plays a woman who marries rich men, gets them to change their will so they leave her everything, whereupon she kills them. Debra Winger is a Justice Department investigator who becomes consumed with connecting the dots in the absence of any concrete evidence (Theresa Russell covers things up perfectly), and proving that Theresa Russell is a killer. Once Theresa Russell figures out what Debra Winger's up to, she starts scheming an elaborate frame-up to get Debra Winger off her (very shapely) ass, only to see Debra Winger's (third and final spoiler warning) even more elaborate scheme bring about her downfall.
The story is not what makes Black Widow so much fun: it's the players and the execution. Rafelson does a good job keeping things relatively light and not trying to sell the audience on the reality of what's going on (which would be disastrous). It's a movie about how everyone wants to have sex with Theresa Russell (which in 1987 was about as universal as truths came), up to and including Debra Winger, and because that one centrally important truth was so compelling, the rest of the movie falls into place.
Also, it helped having, as a counterpoint to Theresa Russell's perfectly executed, seductive, wildly implausible villainy, Debra Winger be a completely convincing, unglamorous, awkward, regular person. This is something Hollywood constantly fucks up at, resulting in “put glasses on the supermodel and now she's ugly”syndrome, but in Black Widow, it's not just that Debra Winger is dressed in baggy sweaters, long skirts, and flats, her physicality is (deliberately) awkward, her interactions with other people even more so, she doesn't wear makeup, and you actually buy her not having had a date in forever even though her right-hand man (D.W. Moffet) and boss (Terry O'Quinn) are both clearly crushing on her. This is not because Rafelson, Hall, and the costume and makeup designers succeeded in “uglifying” her. For one, that's not physically possible—this is, after all, Debra Winger we're talking about here; for my money she was even hotter than Theresa Russell at the time, but I'm weird—but for another, the one thing the movie does a pretty good and quite sympathetic job of doing is presenting her as a closet case.
Back in the bad old days, gay characters had to be closeted, or punished, or any number of stupid conventions, but Debra Winger's character in Black Widow is one case where it actually works for the movie's benefit. They're not exactly subtle about it: her name is Alex, an androgynous shortening of Alexandra, she evinces nervous befuddlement at her male co-workers' advances and an all-consuming obsession with a gorgeous woman, and even though this has nothing to do with the movie itself, every 80s lesbian was all about the Debra Winger, so there's a bit of pop-cultural osmosis, and for all we know casting her in the first place might have been a subtle signifier of the character's repressed sexuality. And having her be unconsciously attracted to her target adds an intriguing wrinkle, the sort of thing one didn't always see in crime movies, 80s movies, or really any movies for that matter.
It also adds another wrinkle to the part when, once Theresa Russell has realized that Debra Winger might be a cop, and she concocts her elaborate scheme to frame Debra Winger for boyfriend-and-later-fiance Sami Frey's murder, a key element of which is setting Debra Winger up to shtup Sami Frey. Sami Frey being a French guy made that element of the equation easy. French guys' default mode is “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man,” so when Theresa Russell is all like “I'm jetting back to the mainland [they're in Hawaii for the whole last hour of the movie, which accounts for some gorgeous and unusual scenery]” Sami Frey is like “But . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” and his French guy programming starts going “syntax error” and he gets confused, which means Theresa Russell has to point him at Debra Winger (a beautful woman), at which point Sami Frey is like, “Ah, phew, all is right with the world . . . I make love to zee beautiful woo-man!” And so they shtup, even though Debra Winger would clearly rather be nailing Theresa Russell. But Sami Frey was in Bande à Part, and even aside from that deal-clincher, he's got that passionate French guy thing going on, and Debra Winger clearly enjoys the sex. Nailing Sami Frey doesn't make her straight, it just means she knows what's up. And anyway, when he tells her that he's decided to get married to Theresa Russell—and in such a dope French guy way, too: “[Theresa Russell] and I . . . have decided to marry.” Seriously, French people fucking rule—Debra Winger is less upset that the guy she shtupped is getting married to another woman than she is “this guy is going to get murdered unless I do something.” And she already went through the experience of meeting Nicol Williamson at the end of the movie's elongated first act, and was upset when Theresa Russell killed him, this was just one horny, exotic French bridge too far.
Being worried that Theresa Russell was going to kill him was a natural reaction, too, because she kills the shit out of everyone in this. That sense of inevitability was created by one really, really good bit of editing early on, where Dennis Hopper (dead husband #2) is looking for a non-empty bottle of booze, and Theresa Russell tells him there's one—that we've just seen her shooting bad stuff into with a syringe—and he goes “ah there it is” and then BAM we cut to his funeral. It's like, if you're a rich guy, Theresa Russell is going to kill you. When she moves on to Nicol Williamson, she's shown preparing to be his perfect woman in an incredibly calculating fashion, reading up on all the kind of obscure, esoteric shit that he likes. He takes one look at her and immediately realizes that she's full of shit, being smart enough to connect the dots like “something's wrong, no one would be this perfect, not only looking like Theresa Russell but also interested in the exact same stuff I am in the exact way I always wanted someone to be interested in it” and he openly calls her on it. That's when she's like, “well, time for plan B” and gets naked, and once he gets a look at Theresa Russell naked, Dickol Williamson goes, “Nuh uh, boss, there is nothing whatsoever to be worried about here, let me handle this one” and thus was the beginning of the end.
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| I mean, seriously, I've seen the movie like eight times and I'd still get in that pool.... |
As smart as Theresa Russell was, she does make a couple really dumb-ass mistakes, though these are well within the realm of possibility for someone crazy enough to pull that kind of serial husband-murdering/inheritance aggregating scheme. One, that she doesn't rectify until too late, was not staying in frequent enough contact with the in-laws she'd seduced along with her ex-husbands, because as Debra Winger points out to Lois Smith, “she just vanished,” and Lois Smith is like, “Damn it, she's right, something's up.” The other mistake, that only really manifests after Theresa Russell thinks her frame-up of Debra Winger in the third act worked, is over-confidence. When she goes to see Debra Winger in jail, thinking that her plan has succeeded and she's framed Debra Winger, she can't resist the temptation to gloat, at which point Debra Winger turns the tables and has the cops bring Lois Smith and the very much not dead Sami Frey into the room. The Hawaiian cops go “damn, that sure was easy for such a convoluted plan,” and Debra Winger takes her new tan and fancy tropical dress and fucks off right out of the police station and into the closing credits, leaving Theresa Russell to ponder just where she went wrong and the audience to be like, “Wait a minute . . . how the hell did Debra Winger get the money to stay in Hawaii for all those months? And isn't she going to be facing a review board or something when she gets back to DC? Will Terry O'Quinn pull strings for her because wants to nail her, or will he not bother because he's never going to because she's gay?”
That's all part of why Black Widow is in that fourth category at the beginning of the post. It doesn't close all its circles, and does have a couple pretty serious narrative problems, one being that Theresa Russell is given no other motivation than “she's just evil” which is unfortunate, because all the empathy that went toward portraying Debra Winger's character as a normal person meant that the writers could have taken a second to give Theresa Russell a more realistic motivation for needing all that money (“you're never quite rich enough” being a little weak). The other is that the premise takes so long to set up that the first act is forty five minutes long and the whole rest of the movie is less than an hour, giving short shrift to the whole “Sami Frey walking around going 'I make love to zee beautiful woo-man' in Hawaii” part of the story, which means that James Hong only gets to be in a couple scenes as the sleaziest PI in the history of cinema (Ed. Note: all movies need more James Hong, even if he's not in them) and we miss out on the opportunity to develop the character of the Hawaiian cop a little more, because he's awesome but he only gets to be awesome for like thirty seconds, which is a shame. Then again, if you elongate the Hawaiian section, you lose out on one fantastic twenty minute Nicol Williamson performance, because holy shit. Even when he's playing a doomed husband in a trashy 80s thriller, that motherfucker puts on a master class. The way he futzes with his cuff when trying to figure out why Theresa Russell is coming on so strong manages to convey nervousness, uncontrollable sexual desire, and existential terror in one gesture. Is that talent? Yeah, that's talent.
So, even though its good qualities make Black Widow a little more than just a standard trashy 80s thriller, its bad qualities make it little more than a standard trashy 80s thriller. (Ed. Note: not a typo, read it again). And that, sadly, means it's not a “good” movie. But holy fuck is it fun. The sexual tension between Theresa Russell and Debra Winger alone could power Honolulu for a month. Sami Frey does the “I make love to zee beautiful woo-man” routine with panache. Nicol fucking Williamson. A Dennis Hopper cameo that's short enough that he doesn't wear out his welcome. Fuck yeah, Black Widow. Fuck yeah.
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