Steal Magnolias
Nov 21, 2018Aside from that misfire (for which Flynn received only “based on the novel by” credit), Flynn’s endeavors into movies and television have produced a string of starry, auteur-caliber collaborations. Her marriage-woes dissection Gone Girl found an ideal interrogator in David Fincher, whose ruthless efficiency lent astonishing speed to the pair’s 2014 adaptation, for which Flynn wrote the script; the movie feels like an Alfred Hitchcock thriller edited at the breathless pace of The Social Network’s (2010) opening credits. Earlier this year, a miniseries version of Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, landed to considerable acclaim on HBO courtesy of Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian director who also received laurels at that network for his steering of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies into award-winning television. Vallée’s fluid, editing-heavy style matches naturally with Flynn’s emphasis on flashbacks and long-buried traumas; over the eight episodes of Sharp Objects, the vivid memories of the alcoholic journalist Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) stream in and out at a consistent clip, much like they do in Vallée’s Cheryl Strayed adaptation, Wild (2014).Flynn’s latest, Widows, teams her with another name-brand director: Steve McQueen, the Turner Prize–winning artist whose previous screen project, 12 Years a Slave (2013)—based on the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup—garnered the Best Picture Oscar. For both Flynn and McQueen, Widows marks a departure: Flynn’s source material here is, for the first time, not one of her own books, but rather a same-named, Lynda La Plante–authored British TV series from the 1980s. For McQueen, who shares screenplay credit with Flynn, Widows—a studio-backed heist thriller with a cast of endless celebrities—surfaces as the first movie he’s ever made that promises something like fun. McQueen is the kind of director who will dream up a movie about a sex ...
