It’s been two years since the last Marvel movie came out and it’s actually been a nice, needed break. Avengers: Endgame was such an event and such a “series finale” kind of movie that it made sense for the franchise to be put on pause for a bit. Of course that wasn’t the plan. The wheel was supposed to keep turning business as usual but COVID got in the way.That necessary break for the Marvel Cinematic Universe was forced on them. But now it’s over. Marvel’s been putting out shows on Disney+ that have varied wildly in quality and Black Widow now marks their return to theatres.
Directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow is a bit of an odd beast -a film many would say is long overdue, about the only female member of the original Avengers. It’s especially overdue now that the character has died, this film essentially being a post-mortem on someone whose story within this larger universe is over (though the movie makes pretty clear she’s got a successor). Scarlett Johansson has been pushing for this movie as long as the fans and it only took her character being fridged in the biggest film of all time for her to finally get it.
On some level, Black Widow is at a disadvantage owing to this. As far as the greater Marvel franchise is concerned, little of this movie will pay dividends down the road: a rare largely standalone side-adventure for their canon, which isn’t preferable for a company that wants every installment to feel like an essential piece of a larger story. Black Widow is absolutely inessential, but as a movie over an episode of the MCU saga, that is actually one of its’ strengths. Barring a bookend device with William Hurt to connect dots and a series of references to Natasha Romanoff’s superhero friends, the film is surprisingly divorced from the trappings of the greater Marvel continuity -something especially fascinating given how up to this point the Black Widow character has been defined by her relations to other more prominent characters and institutions. She is an Agent of SHIELD, a sidekick to Captain America, an Avenger, a one-time love interest to the Hulk -but she hasn’t existed on her own terms, has had little identity outside of these associations.
Black Widow is not terribly subtle on this point. At a couple junctures when asked about her friends, she directly asserts her independence, that she’s going it on her own, pursuing a personal enterprise in her native Russia. The script can’t help bringing up the Avengers every so often, reiterating her place in that collective, but Scarlett Johansson fights against it as she attempts to make the argument she can hold her own centering a movie as this character. Unfortunately for her though, she is frequently upstaged by the consistently incredible Florence Pugh, brought into the Marvel fold to play Natasha’s younger sister and clear inheritor of the Black Widow mantle, Yelena Belova. Pugh’s performance is perhaps the movies’ greatest asset -she carries just about every significant emotional beat, inhabits authentically the complexity of her characters’ history, makes good on the humour of otherwise unfunny lines, and probably has the best Russian accent of all these non-Russian actors. She’s got fine chemistry with Johansson too, as the pair of surrogate siblings reunited for the first time since childhood to take down the Red Room, a secretive Russian organization that grooms abducted young girls into elite assassins, of which they are both victims. To make things easier for them and for the plot, this whole system is entirely consolidated in one individual -a Soviet-era Bond villain called Dreykov played Ray Winstone.
The elite spy genre is what the movie is most vividly trying to evoke. And it perhaps fits that mold better than other Marvel movies claiming to embody different genres, if for no other reason than the fact that Black Widow is the first Marvel movie fronted by a character with no superhuman capabilities or super-powered suit –in fact the origin of her special skills is rooted in abuse and conditioning. The exploitation of young girls is a theme exceptionally heavy for a Marvel film and Black Widow acknowledging such a thing is rather bold. Yet this subject matter rarely goes beyond the abstract or the moral aesthetic of the piece. Even something as invasive and disturbing as a pheromone lock Dreykov has installed in every one of his “widows” functions purely as plot device –a cheap element of tension only. Earlier there is a scene confirming that widows are subjected to involuntary hysterectomies that is played as a joke, and an instance of animal abuse by an otherwise “good” character that goes unquestioned. What Dreykov has done to these girls for decades is never interrogated substantively, any underlying trauma Natasha or Yelena is carrying (hinted at in Age of Ultron) is not considered. Black Widow wants to give the impression that it takes this topic seriously, that it is a feminist text about the liberation of women from abusive power structures -but it’s incapable of doing so authentically because of that need to fit in the superhero movie framework. It strives for valuable commentary, but also needs the megalomaniacal villain with the army of highly-trained foot-soldiers. It wants to lend agency and pathos to poor, experiment-victim Olga Kurylenko, but also emphasize her android-like aspect and badass fighting style. An equilibrium can be reached but Black Widow sadly doesn’t meet it.
A choice was clearly made for this movies’ primary focus between exploring the depths of the Red Room and a theme of family for Natasha, and the latter is what won out. The movie opens on Natasha and Yelena as children living an ordinary existence in rural Ohio with two parent figures, a lifestyle that is revealed to have been an elaborate three-year ruse in one of the films’ more successful beats. But the lasting impact of this period carries over and is quite engaging. Even though Natasha and Yelena have no blood connection to each other, ‘father’ Alexei (formerly the Soviet knock-off of Captain America) played by David Harbour, or ‘mother’ Melina played by Rachel Weisz, they can’t so easily shed their relationship as a family unit. The movie digs into this complex with considerably more comfort and emotional resonance, in part because Pugh and Harbour play it so well (Weisz sadly is underwhelming). The pair of them share one of the other highlight scenes of the movie in which they bond over their time together and sing “American Pie” (the other notable needle-drop of the film is a ghastly grim rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over the opening credits).
Johansson doesn’t get moments that hit in the same way; often she even feels detached despite driving the action. There’s a character introduced played by O-T Fagbenle with whom she has an apparent history, but it’s not much touched on. Little of her personal life is. Natasha is played with just the same determination and stealth and core values as in the other MCU projects (Johanssons’ performance is decent as its’ always been), but it’s unfortunate a movie meant to be about her can’t expand on any of that –especially seeing as it is presumably the last bow of the character. Her action scenes and her rapport with Yelena are where she’s strongest, but it still leaves something to be desired in a swansong.
I wouldn’t say I disliked Black Widow but I wasn’t particularly enthralled by it. Like just about every Marvel movie, it’s got its’ moments and I respect certainly the greater ambition than was expected for this film, even if it wasn’t ultimately realized. The family dynamics at its’ heart are a saving grace of sorts, and Pugh and Harbour make the film worth your time. But it’s severely limited in how it can tackle its’ worthier subject, making its’ failings therein starker; and limiting for the very character it’s meant to hone in on –giving her a better exit than Endgame did, but not a terribly meaningful one.
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