Sicario
Director: Denis
Villeneuve
Writer: Taylor
Sheridan
Starring: Emily
Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin
Rating: Four and a
half stars out of five
Available in
theaters now
The rock formations
and rolling hills look like screaming, anguished faces; a rigged
Rorschach test telling the beholder beware. The mouths gape and the
eyes melt under the baking Arizona sun. A music cue heavily reliant
on two droning minor-key notes pounds away at any sense of security
one has left in the world of Sicario. Nothing good can come of
this place, but a slippery grasp of something resembling order might
be within reach.
This is the
environment Emily Blunt's Kate Macer, a by-the-book FBI agent tasked
with kicking down the doors of an ever-increasing number of drug
cartel safe houses in the greater Phoenix area, finds herself trapped
in. She is good at her job, as are the agents who surround her, but
competence and conscientiousness are not the only things required to
win in the War on Drugs. It is a conflict Sicario paints as
ambiguous and vague, unable to be won because there is no clear
objective to pursue.
Into that goal
vacuum falls Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a crack U.S. agent of
not-immediately-determinable agency affiliation, and Alejandro
(Benicio Del Toro), a former Mexican prosecutor turned drug war free
agent. Graver is a person who absolutely believes in what he is
doing, even if he is unable to clearly define what it is to others.
He is the type of man who can sleep at night no matter what morally
questionable actions he may take during the day. He jaunts around
military bases and private planes in sandals and t-shirts, napping on
couches and generally taking a zen master's approach to every
situation. Nothing matters, therefore everything is all right,
especially if he can present a false sense of control to his
higher-ups and maybe prevent a few more people from dying. And
Alejandro, seemingly with Graver's blessing, has extracurricular
activities planned that require playing the many sides of the
struggle off of each other.
Kate is recruited
to be part of a team ostensibly meant to perform one goal: Close off
an underground tunnel used by one of the deadliest cartels to bring
their product across the border. But, as with all things related to
this battle, obfuscation becomes the name of the game. The tunnel
proves exceedingly difficult to even locate, let alone reach, and the
procedural police work required to get there allows for an
understanding of how hard it is to accomplish anything productive,
let alone good, in a world saturated in violence.
But Sicario
director Denis Villeneuve does not revel in that violence. He
hardly depicts violence in a direct way at all. He is concerned with
its effects on those who are present for it. Villeneuve understands
that the moment of impact is not the shock of the thing, but rather
the response to it that is affecting. A bomb goes off and
Villeneuve's instinct is to show the panic and disorientation in the
eyes of those who escaped with their lives. Gun deaths happen
onscreen and blood is shed, but the cuts are so precise and so eager
to return to the faces of the living, often the perpetrators of those
deaths, to create an emotional connection to, and empathy for, the
deceased no matter their own role in the atrocities around them. The
violence wracks most of the living with guilt and shame, not only
because of what they survived but because of their part in creating
something to survive from and their refusal to abstain from
partaking in such acts. And for those without those feelings of
regret, they are left with a numb, relentless drive for revenge.
Sicario has
one primary fault. It shortchanges the motivation of a primary
character by having that character's background explained in a
conversation between people who are not him. It is not a reveal so
much as an expository obligation tossed out to check off a box that
could be so much more satisfactorily checked by that character
himself in his shocking climactic scene. As it stands, that sequence
prevents his background from achieving its full gravity because the
air has already been let out of the suspense balloon.
And
yet, that climax is still a
masterclass in tension, with Villeneuve's controlled, understated
violence occurring on the periphery of the frame after a buildup of
horrifying matter-of-factness about the inevitability of the outcome.
That it could yet be improved is a slight disappointment, but it is
the most minor of letdowns among a sea of exquisite boldness.
Villeneuve displays in scene after scene an intrinsic feel for the
manipulative nature of the medium, its ability to delineate
information to an audience through subjective means. Sicario's
lessons about the human response to horror and constant, often
futile, attempts to gain control over the world around us are clear
and stark. But they are productive in the end, for the film's
prescription to change the reality of these urges is a simplification
of objectives and a reordering of priorities.
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