(we disagree-ish) Black Widow

 2020, d. Cate Shortland - Disney+

It's funny that both Toast and I needed a second viewing of Black Widow before we could write about it (Toasty popped his review out unexpectedly the same day I planned to write mine). We both certainly agree that the quieter moments of the film are its greatest strength, and we both agree that the necessities of being a Marvel Studios production make it more generic rather than enhance it, but I think where we disagree is strictly a matter of how the film resonates with us, and there's not really anything to debate there. How it hits us is how it hits us.

It's possible that it resonates more with me being that I'm in a seriously pro-Black Widow household (the wife is a big fan of Natasha, her third MCU favourite next to Winter Soldier and Captain America), but I'd like to think that I can be quite objective despite her enthusiasm (see my Falcon and the Winter Soldier review).  

But in trying to think about Black Widow, there's first a lot of noise that one must work past:

-- Natasha's death in Avengers: Endgame is still a sticking point for many fans (shoulda been Clint)

- It's a film that story-wise takes place between Captain America:Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War which, in its retroactive insertion into the timeline, makes it a bigger ask for the casual Marvel filmgoer to make sense of.  Old school comic book nerds are used to having to think about continuity, but casual viewers who aren't investing in watching youtube breakdowns or having extensive nerdy conversations or writing blogs may find this frustrating.

- This solo movie was long, long-overdue (Natasha was the only original Avenger besides Hawkeye not to have his own movie [if there was still any doubt a recent What If...? episode confirms The Incredible Hulk is considered canon ]).  The character has appeared in 7 films prior to this, almost all of them in large ensembles as a featured player, only once as a co-starring character (in Captain America: Winter Soldier) though having only nominal arcs of her own.

- It was delayed due to the pandemic for over a year.  I don't know if that increased expectations or decreased them, as pre-pandemic a film being delayed over and over again was usually a sign of poor quality, and people were kind of trained to expect that a long delayed film would not be very good.

- It did debut in theatres but also on Disney+ as a premium purchase.  A lot of people are skipping the theatres for safety reasons and watching these massive-scale movies (Wonder Woman 1984, F9, Godzilla vs Kong etc) at home and I think much of the awe and wow factor is lost as a result.  We're watching these massive scale productions for the first time on the same screens as we watch Sportscenter or The Bachelorette or Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

- ScarJo filed a lawsuit against Disney for lost share percentage because of their decision to do day-and-date streaming.

- Scarlett Johansson has said some pretty dumbass things in the year-plus leading into this release.

Whether we want it to or not, all of this baggage weighs on the film, and will continue to weigh on the film until people are able to come at it, and the MCU films, cold.

If I pack all the meta baggage aside, what I have left is a pretty fun movie.  Is it the movie we should have about a superspy who hangs with superheroes...?  I'd say about 80/20 in favor of yeah, but it's also film that "fits" with the MCU.  As much as I would have liked a sterner, more severe espionage thriller, I can't help but be pleased by the candy coated action flick we received.

Natasha Romanov's story has been dispensed in very small nuggets over her previous films, but here all of those threads are wrapped in a bow.  The Red Room, where Black Widows are trained, has been hinted at in the past, but it's cruel, deplorable, misogynistic practices and ethos are laid bare.  

The film opens decades earlier with a young Natasha three years into a seemingly normal American life in Ohio with her "kid sister", Yelena, and "mother", Melina (Rachel Weisz).  When her "father", Alexei (David Harbour), comes home, their placid, suburban existence is upended as they race to escape the feds.  Upon reuniting with their Russian countrymen the girls are torn from their manufactured family, and each other, and placed back into the Red Room program.  The opening credits roll to a haunting rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and a horrifying montage of some of what the Red Room subjects the girls to, some evidence of their manufactured
American family life, and hints at the patriarch (Ray Winstone) of the Red Room program and the tendrils that connect him to politics across the globe.  

It's hard, as a 40+ person, to not have a wincing reaction to this re-imagining of Nirvana's biggest hit (although Tori Amos did a very similar rendition 25 years ago).  The song carries too much context to be effectively used.  I think it would have been more exciting had they went for a more Bond-esque original torch song.  That said, the imagery of child abuse is pretty disturbing.

An unfortunate consequence of Natasha dying in Endgame is they had to place her story between appearances, which leads to an introductory sequence that, rather than introducing you to Black Widow as a character, introduces you to the chronology of the story, setting it shortly after the events of Civil War.  Is it essential to know what went on in Civil War? Not really, the film tells you what you need to know, basically that Natasha is on the run, no longer an Avenger, no longer an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., she is on her own.  But what it does reveal is she's set up to be on her own, she has contingencies, Nat is a planner (but as we've seen previously, as well as later in this film, also quite a resourceful improviser).

Meanwhile we also catch up with her "younger sister" Yelena, who is working with a team of Black Widows to take out a rogue Black Widow.  In the process we find out the Black Widows are being chemically controlled (as a result of Natasha's defection years earlier) and Yelena is exposed to the antidote.  Yelena, like Natasha, is now on the run.

Yelena draws Nat to her, and they fight, unsure if they can trust one another.  What's evident is that Natasha's more resilient where Yelena is a more precise fighter.  The two women, now on the run together, are haunted by their past familial relationship.  The subtext of their relationship -- both having been brought into the Red Room as infants, torn away from their lives as all Widows were, subjected to mutual horrors -- is there should be an ingrained sisterhood to the Widows, yet, the idea of "family" also seems to be a vulnerability that was unsuccessfully beaten out of them.  The fact that Yelena and Natasha had 3 years of "normalcy" together does bind them, but they've both been well conditioned to ignore it.  For Yelena, it's a much rawer nerve, having felt abandoned by the only family she ever knew.  For Natasha, she had already been through some Red Room training, she knew their time in America was fake, but she still succumbed to it.  The pain of having it ripped away was so great that she effectively shut down all sense of connection to it.  

Toasty isn't the only one to comment that Natasha's seems a secondary character in her own movie, that the need to establish Yelena as the new Black Widow of the MCU was perhaps a greater drive than giving Nat her own major arc.  I think these comments are wrong though.  Yes, Florence Pugh is outstanding, and she dominates her scenes.  She's skilled, driven and tough, but vulnerable and emotional especially with her family connection reestablished.  She gets to have the wild emotional arc.  Natasha, though, is the center, and her story is all subtextual, for better or worse.  

Nat, the world's premiere super-spy, has had a long time to develop her calm, cool, collected demeanor.  Her characterization here is absolutely on point with what we've seen of her before.  There's still a sense that she wants to be unknowable, unconnected.  Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Age of Ultron were jobs.  Even her relationship with Bruce Banner was less about intimacy then about Nat controlling her fear (confronting the Hulk was the one thing that terrified her, so she sought out a way to control him).  But he left her.

Her tightest connection, to Clint Barton, is still a very chilly kinship, one that still has layers that need revealing.  She's "Aunty Nat" to his kids, she's fiercely loyal  to him and will go to any ends for him, but still it's more comrade-at-arms/endebted affection (same that she has with Steve Rogers) than familial.  And Clint has a home to retreat to.  She doesn't.  So at a certain point the Avengers became something she had to take care of, a group of individuals who might not otherwise cohere without her.  In Age of Ultron she's talking motherly to them, and by the time Endgame begins has completely adopted the matriarch role.  But in the time Black Widow, her manufactured Avengers family has fallen apart, Tony has thrown her away like her faux Father and Mother figures did years before, so she shuts down again.  Subtext.

This film is still all about Natasha's journey, from being cold and closed off and wounded and resentful, to embracing the people that want her love, and to love her.  At a certain point she convinced herself that those years in Ohio were just a job, a job she may have been too young to handle emotionally, but a job nonetheless.  The lesson she learned was to not get attached.  In rekindling with her family and having their help in destroying both the force that brought them together but also, in a sense, broke them she learns that families remain families even when separated by time or disagreements or ideological differences, and for all the pain that can result from having emotional connections with people, it's better than not having any at all. 

Natasha is the quiet one in the scenes with Yelena, with Alexei, and with the family.  She's the one sitting back from the bickering trying desperately to stay on mission, to not get involved, to not let emotion get the better of her, to not love these people.  It's only upon seeing that Melina, a veteran Black Widow, has kept a memento of their time in Ohio that Natasha starts to think that maybe it's okay to have connections and feelings and a past worth remembering rather than regretting.  

Johansson at the time of filming Black Widow had played the character for 10 years.  While it's possible that she was on autopilot in playing Nat, to me it's more a skin she's comfortable living in.  She knows Nat, what she's been through and what the effect it's had on her.  It sure would have been a different movie had we had it in, say, 2014 before Age of Ultron, but I think it would have only been a slightly different performance from Johansson had this come out in 2017 between Civil War and Infinity War. 

The action set pieces here range from good to good.  They're all pretty good.  None of them are mind blowing but none of them are duds either.  Not watching it on the big screen, I don't really know what exactly I'm missing from these action sequences, but I can't help but think that the hovering-in-the-clouds Red Room satellite complex would have been a much more awe-inspiring reveal on the big screen.  

The fight choreography here is smart and well thought through.  The Widows are all fairly evenly matched, having all been trained the same way, so that when they go head-to-head there's a lot of aping.  The Taskmaster, a notch above perfunctory mook villain (the identity of which is meant to be a bit of a reveal is spoiled in the opening credits thanks to a notable actor who was not part of any promotional material), has studied (and had uploaded into their brain) the skills of many different fighters. including the Avengers, which means they know all of the Black Widows tricks, as well as having Hawkeye, Captain America and Black Panther's gimmicks, among others.  

Even without more globe-trotting, undercover, espionage type aspects, the film captures the over-the-top Bond-ness with a big secret base/destruction sequence, the number 1 goon, and the plot to take over the world tropes which satisfy more than enough.  I wasn't expecting so much humour, which is now very much the Marvel style, for better or worse.  Much of the comedy falls at the feet of Harbour, who plays an out-of-shape super-soldier, codenamed Red Guardian, who thinks himself much like Russia's Captain America, only without the international celebrity.  That he wallows in obscurity is as likely a result of being a bit of a goofball vainglorious idiot teddybear as it is that his showmanship of individual exceptionalism is not something Communist governments care much for.

I really quite enjoy this movie.  Its really quite fun, all the inescapable meta-context aside.  The major regret is that it comes after the death of the main character, just when an absolutely fantastic supporting cast and expanded world is introduced for her.  There was potential for maybe a sequel that could take place between Infinity War and Endgame  but given the lawsuit, I'd say that ScarJo's time in the MCU has likely come to an end.