(dir. Denis Villeneuve)
 |
| Lionsgate |
“Nothing will make sense to your American ears.”
If you’ve ever experienced a sudden heat rising in
your throat, a certain indistinguishable quality to your hearing where
everything seems distant and yet uncomfortably loud, a feeling not totally
dissimilar to sinking, then you may have already gotten a taste of what Denis
Villeneuve’s latest film is like in its finest moments. Sicario is a panic attack, not only in its efforts to create a
visceral emotional experience for its audience, but also as a cinematic
critique of a compassionless American government.
Sicario
finds FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) handpicked by government consultant
Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to aid him, a team of CIA operatives, and the
mysterious interrogator Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) to hunt down a Mexican
drug lord whose business has crossed the U.S. border. As their hunt leads them
further across the border, and straight out of U.S. jurisdiction, Macer finds
her loyalties tested and her sense of justice compromised. No longer protected
by the laws she thought defined her, Macer finds herself an unwilling pawn in a
squad of American-sanctioned hitmen. Like Prisoners
and Enemy, Villeneuve takes his
characters (and viewers) down a long, and winding tunnel of darkness where the
light at the end is the illumination of their true selves, which they, and
perhaps we, were hesitant to face.
In many ways, Sicario
is like Westerns of old, the ones that saw cowboy ethics fall to the wayside
as industrialization and railroads brought the frontier to an end. The west
that Kate Macer finds herself in is also undergoing a massive upheaval in the
form of drug runners from Mexico whose own railroads, in the form of secret,
underground tunnels are reshaping the land. Blunt portrays Macer as stoically
observant, quiet yet desperate for answers, professionally calm but privately
emotional. For all intents and purposes she’s one of the last remaining
bastions of empathy and unshakable righteousness in a cruel and lawless land—at
least that’s how she regards herself. She’s unsure of her role within Graver’s
team, but committed to the notion that she is acting heroically, preventing
further death. But Villeneuve has displayed a consistent interest in
deconstructing who his characters think they are, and who they realize they are
when they find themselves in what Alejandro refers to as “a land of wolves.”
Macer isn’t marked by a sharp and violent tragedy that sends her over the edge
like Hugh Jackman’s Keller Dover in Prisoners.
Instead she’s more akin to Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki, a character whose good
intentions and curiousness lead her to answers that shatter faith and purpose.
It is purpose that Brolin’s grinning, sandal-wearing
Graver promises. With his almost callously easy-going nature, he isn’t concerned
with the human interest side of wiping out the Mexican cartel--how it will
better the lives of the citizens who live in fear of mutilation. He cares
nothing for the people of Juarez, only for what the destruction of the cartel
will mean for the future of American politics. He’s chaos, as the film puts it,
especially when compared to Del Toro’s orderly and ominous Alejandro whose
greatest fault may be that he is too human, too connected to the past, to be just.
Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan carefully situates Macer between these two men,
resulting in three conflicting reflections of America and no clear winner.
While the film’s many plot points and twists create a somewhat winding
narrative that isn’t always easy to follow in the moment, Sheridan’s script
only serves to showcase the complex nature of offensive political measures and
power moves.
Villeneuve skillfully handles the film’s
action-oriented conflicts, refusing to turn the film into an action-movie and
yet creating tactical shootouts that serve as highpoints in the film. Every
gunshot feels startlingly real and close, almost conditioning the audience to
dread the shootouts, or at least find them startling instead of comforting
popcorn fare. Sicario doesn’t display
a condemnation of violence. The film is brutal and stylishly edited in its
depiction of it, but it never establishes its stakes in a way where heroes and
villains can be delineated. In the film’s longest shootout scene during the
third act, the targets are never shown. We see the CIA firing guns, we see
retaliation, hear shouts, and eventually see bodies, but Villeneuve never
situates the audience in a position to clap, cheer, or whatever it is people do
during major battle scenes. So while the American government the film depicts
may be solely focused on big picture actions, Villeneuve is interested in the
up close and personal ones, the shots that count.
Sicario’s
sense of impending, unavoidable doom and bleakness is furthered by incomparable
cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Deakins
constructs some of the best shots of the year, creating an almost constant
sense of downward motion. In one of the film’s best scenes, Deakins captures
Macer alongside a team of CIA operatives as they move down a slope,
disappearing into the shadow created by the setting sun. In the film’s many
overhead landscape shots, the camera slowly moves across the dry land,
distorting it so that it almost looks like close-ups of bones. Death and
descent permeate the film, and Jóhannsson’s score shifts between dark, rhythmic
pulses, and what can only be described as the musical equivalent of children
crying. And yet this near constant bleakness is contrasted by the daylight of most
scenes, and the film’s color palate that consists primarily of shades of yellow
and orange. These serve as reminders that however harsh the events on screen
may be and however murky the film gets in terms of plot points and character
motivations, there is always illumination at the end. Perhaps not warm or
appealing, but illumination all the same.
There are fleeting moments of humor, but in the end
there is little hope to be found in the film’s message. And yet despite this,
or perhaps because of it, Sicario is
one of the year’s best films. It is entirely uncompromising in vision and
denunciation without feeling trite, unwarranted, or grossly political. Sicario is a riveting, entertaining and
disheartening light that leads us out of the Western Civilization we once knew.
Grade: A
