Cate Shortland’s spy film is at its best as a comedy about a fake Russian family around a kitchen table, and Florence Pugh runs off with it. The villain is a man at a desk and the last half hour is digital weather.
Cate Shortland’s Black Widow arrives eleven years after the character first appeared in Iron Man 2 (2010) and slots itself into a gap between earlier films, which means it can change nothing. Eric Pearson’s screenplay, from a story by Ned Benson and Jac Schaeffer, gets round this by making a film about a family rather than a hero: four Russian agents who once pretended to be a household in Ohio and have not spoken since. When those four are in a room together, Black Widow is as good as anything Marvel has made in years. When it remembers it also needs a villain and a fortress, it becomes the film you were expecting.
Florence Pugh is the reason to see it. Yelena Belova has spent her adult life as one of Dreykov’s controlled Widows and has just been freed, and Pugh plays her as someone who has decided to be unimpressed by everything as a matter of policy. The sisters’ first meeting, in a Budapest flat, is a fight Shortland stages at close quarters with curtains, a sink and a hob, and Gabriel Beristain shoots it hand-held and near enough that we can see both women getting tired. Then they sit on the floor and talk, and when Yelena says the Ohio years were real to her whatever they were to everyone else, we were caught off guard and moved. Pugh says it as an accusation, not a plea, and that is why it works.
David Harbour is Alexei, once the Soviet answer to Captain America and now a heavy man in a prison yard, arm-wrestling for a living. He plays a boastful, sentimental father who has forgotten the daughters were not his, and he gets most of the laughs. Rachel Weisz has the harder job as Melina, a scientist alone on a farm where the pigs do what she tells them, and she plays her cool and tired and gives the dinner scene its only adult. She deserved another twenty minutes and the film spent them elsewhere.
The craft is steady rather than distinctive. Charles Wood’s production design is best when it is smallest: the Budapest flat, the farmhouse with its clutter of chemistry and feed. Beristain lights Norway in flat grey and the prologue in the orange of a suburban evening. Lorne Balfe’s score leans on low choir and a slow, mournful theme that suits the family and has nothing to offer the action. Matthew Schmidt and Leigh Folsom Boyd cut the first hour with room to breathe and the last half hour in fragments, which is what happens when there is little to cut between except falling metal.
Ray Winstone plays Dreykov from behind a desk, and he is given speeches about controlling women and no scenes in which he does anything but sit. Behind him is the darkest material Marvel has touched: girls bought, trained, sterilised and steered like drones. Yelena describes the surgery, flatly, to a father who does not want to hear it; the scene is sharp and the film then moves on, and that is the last we hear of it as anything but plot. When the last act turns grey with digital smoke and debris, we watched with the resignation of people who have seen this ending eight or nine times under other titles, and we had stopped caring which sister landed where.
Shortland’s Lore (2012) followed children across Germany at the end of the war and trusted silence for long stretches. That director is here, on the Budapest floor and at the farmhouse table, and there are other stretches where it could be anyone. The film keeps nodding towards Bond: Natasha watches Moonraker (1979) alone in her caravan, and the plot has a lair and a henchman with a gimmick. Bond films stop for dinner. This one does too, once, and it is the best scene in it.
It runs 134 minutes at 12A, and about ninety of them are worth your evening if you want to see what four good actors do with a kitchen table. Watch it with someone who will laugh at the dinner, and put the kettle on when the smoke comes in.
