How Black Widow adheres to and breaks from the Marvel formula
We finally have a starring vehicle for Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. But how does it stack up?
Film Features Black Widow
One year later than scheduled—and after years of fan demand—Marvel has finally released a starring vehicle for the most opaque of its Avengers, the Russian assassin that switched sides, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff. How does it stack up against past installments in this forever franchise? And does it manage to deviate from the formula established by its numerous predecessors? On this bonus episode of Film Club, A.A. Dowd, Katie Rife, and special guest Alex McLevy talk about Black Widow, the new Marvel movie playing in theaters and streaming on Disney+. For a larger conversation about the MCU, check out this week’s official, full episode of the podcast.
Here’s what Dowd had to say in his written review of Black Widow:
The film’s mandated collision of snark and somberness is sometimes uneasy: This is a four-quadrant event picture about trauma and guilt and child soldiers that’s also a glib wisecrack machine. At its center is a character who stubbornly refuses to shift fully into focus. “We’re both killers,” Elena tells Natasha, undercutting her delusions of growth and atonement. “You’re just the killer that little girls call their hero.” It’s a provocative line of thinking that the movie can’t resolve. Romanoff’s arc across these films has been a search for some way to erase the “red from her ledger”—an iconic line that gets a callback punchline here. In fashioning a side adventure that’s really a formal goodbye to one of the franchise’s original principles, Black Widow ties a neat bow on that motivation, offering redemption that feels half-earned at best.
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12 Comments
I will never understand the desire of critics to make these movies into some kind of intense family dramedy with “none of the Marvel stuff.” It’s a goddamn Marvel movie!!!
yeah, we all say we want a film full of quiet character moments, but if Marvel ever made one of those it probably wouldn’t make it to the cinemas.also, honestly, Black Widow’s quieter moments are some of the best and most fleshed-out in the MCU, and the film gives you plenty of them in the first two acts. it doesn’t hurt that you’ve got goddamn Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz and David Harbour on hand to act them out, obviously, but I feel the “it’s too quippy!” complaint applies here infinitely less than, say, either Spider-Man movie or the Avengers movies with Whedon at the helm.
I personally thought the film was fine. The plot was pretty basic, the action sequences for the most part nice except the final big action sequence was underwhelming. Absolutely loved Yelena to the degree that I thought her mere presence and interactions made Natasha a better character. Was utterly baffled by the Taskmaster stuff to the degree that I struggle to comprehend the creative process behind that.However, there is a big question I left the movie with and I might remembering this wrong, hence posing it here. Doesn’t this film retroactively make the final moments of Natasha’s character arc in Endgame even worse? I mean, I went back and watched the sacrifice scene and my memory is that the film framed her decision there that she felt that Clint was the only thing she had left in the world while he still had his family he was trying to bring back. This was the reasoning behind her sacrifice as I remember the movie.Yet this film was essentially ‘Natasha realizes she really had a family and a sister who absolutely loved her’, which made the way that sacrifice scene was implemented absolutely baffling. I’m assuming the Hawkeye show will at least attempt to reconcile it, but it felt so off that I am now hesitating that am I misremembering Endgame? Which is completely possible.
My take is that she made peace with her family and past, and wanted Clint to be able to do the same.
But was there anything in Endgame to support this take? As my feeling in the movie was that Natasha hadn’t made peace with anything aside from Clint must live because he’s the one with the family.
It’s entirely possible she never told any of the other Avengers about the events depicted in Black Widow (not that it would have been hard for Tony Stark to find out about a giant fortress crashing out of the sky—especially since he’s got at least one super-advanced surveillance satellite; but then, he might know the broad strokes without knowing that the people involved were Nat’s fake Russian “family”). And so when it came time to sacrifice someone for the Soul Stone, she decided that on balance Clint had more to live for than she did, so she just put up a facade of “I have no one to live for.”
My take on the sacrifice scene is that Clint redeemed Natasha back when she was “bad” and now she wants to do the same for him. Clint sees himself as irredeemable because of the 5 year ruthless assassin phase he’s been going through. Presumably he thinks that he can’t go back to being a farm dad, as much as he misses his family. Natasha thinks that it isn’t too late for him to go back to the Clint she knows and loves. Not to mention the 3 Barton kids need their dad.I don’t think that Nat was without family, even before we met her 25 year estranged surrogate spy family. The Bartons were her family. But she has always kept people at arms length; she’s always been ready to leave her old life behind and start a new one. Repeatedly starting new lives kind of is her life. And so between her and Clint, Natasha felt that sacrificing herself made more sense.
I thought there was some really beautiful stuff in it, Shortland brought some powerful direction to it. But much like a real family there’s tension, drama, and brevity. It’s okay to laugh and cry and be a superhero. I think it achieved all those things and I don’t really get this insistence that it has to be one thing or the other.
Did anyone else notice that when Yelena was describing the fantasy life she had imagined for her sister, she said her husband “renovated houses”. Isn’t that what Jeremy Renner did prior to becoming a mega-successful actor?
Wikipedia says “He has a house-renovating business with his best friend and fellow actor, Kristoffer Winters” but it doesn’t give any additional details, like if this was something he did when younger.
I read an interview with him and he said he made more money flipping houses than he did acting. This was around The Hurt Locker timeframe, so before the Marvel checks started rolling in.
I feel like the A.V. Club should just stop covering Marvel movies, judging from the general hand-waving you gave the entire run of these films in this episode.