Sicario

Denis Villeneuve's Sicario (2015) is a fever-dream of a movie, horrifying while you are enclosed within the film, but, more or less, ludicrous when contemplated after the show in equanimity.  In the theater, you are in thrall to the picture; when the film ended, the audience was stunned into silence.  But, in the parking lot, doubts begin to emerge...  First and foremost, I suppose, is the question of the film's timing.  The movie's ultra-lurid and hyper-violent story seems to have been contrived for the benefit of Donald Trump -- or, more precisely, the movie feels like one of Trump's paranoid  and hysterical fantasies about Mexican perfidy and our country's porous Southern border.  In broad terms, the movie concerns a mission orchestrated by a CIA operative (played with smarmy ferocity by Josh Brolin) to identify and, then, assassinate a shadowy Mexican drug lord, the leader of a cartel that has extended its vicious tentacles into our sweet land of liberty.  Emily Blunt, pursing her lips with tough-minded disapproval, plays the "by-the-books" FBI agent whose involvement in the covert operation is intended to give the entire enterprise legal respectability -- the mission involves cross-border raids, murders, and, a CIA specialty, lots of torture.  Benicio del Toros has the role of the Sicario, apparently, a Mexican word for "assassin" -- he is first presented as a sensitive fellow twitchy as a result of some unexplained trauma, but, as the film, progresses he morphs into a monster of feral cruelty.  Trump's speech writer could have composed much of the mise-en-scene.  The Mexican drug cartel has been slaughtering people in the middle-class suburbs of Chandler, Arizona -- 42 corpses, stacked like mummies in the Capuchin crypt, are walled-up behind sheet-rock in a nondescript suburban rambler.  The border is so porous that the principal Mexican villain drives a BMW with Arizona license-plates.  The cartel has bored a tunnel right under the border itself so that thugs, Trump's "criminals and rapists," can swarm into our country.  Our cops have been infiltrated and are working for Mexican drug-lords.  While horror-movie music thunders ominous chords, Juarez is called "the Beast" and, in the evening, Americans sit on their roofs in El Paso to enjoy the firefights with tracer bullets and huge explosions in the Mexican city.  The main streets of Juarez are picturesquely garnished with headless mutilated corpses dangling from overpasses and light-posts.  The drug lords in Mexico (and Mexico in general) is described as a pathology, as a deadly disease, against which we must "vaccinate" our country.  All of this is spectacularly lurid and the timing of the movie feels a bit suspect -- there is something slightly obscene about the way the movie exploits the precise fears and hyperbole that candidates like Trump have deployed to win votes on the Far Right.  Villeneuve is a morose, seemingly terminally depressed French-Canadian and I doubt very much that the tone of savage xenophobia that the film exhibits is really intentional -- I assume that the director thought he was just making a violent hard-nosed thriller, something like a cross between Steven Soderburgh's Traffic and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA.  But the timing is all wrong and the movie, which is certainly fascinating and thrilling, makes you feel dirty.  Villenueve is one of the most interesting directors working today -- his alarming vigilante film Prisoners showed the ferocious savagery lurking in suburbia, aroused when a young girl is kidnapped.  And Enemy is a hybrid between Kafka and a David Cronenberg horror movie -- that film boasts most mind-blowing final shot of any picture that I have seen in the past couple decades.  In Sicario, Villeneuve works with an enormous sense of authority -- the film is an example of apparently realistic brutalism in cinema on all levels.  First, there are plenty of horrific images in the movie -- the acts shown are brutal and ugly on their face.  Second, the performances are all crudely effective -- the roles played by the actors are completely cartoonish, caricatures of caricatures, but Villeneuve's aggressive and agonized close-ups of his snarling or tortured characters are undeniably powerful.  (The film also exploits the crassest sort of stereotypes -- in particular, a subplot involving a corrupt Mexican cop eating huevos with jalapenos and refried beans for breakfast indulges in a kind of mindless stereotyping that has to be seen to be believed.)  Third, the film, shot by the estimable Roger Deakins,  features intentionally bad camerawork -- indeed, I have never seen a film so persistently ugly:  the images are either washed-out and over-exposed, barren expanses of sun-bleached desert or Mexican metropolis, or underexposed to the point of being illegible.  Many key exchanges between characters are shot with the faces of the actors submerged in deep shadow.  In some scenes, the face of an African-American protagonist simply vanishes in the darkness, an inscrutable black mask.  Aerial footage shows barren hills and desert like the face of the moon.  Some sequences are shot with ghastly green night-scope imagery intercut with a pallid, chalk-grey monochrome, apparently simulating the view through night-vision goggles, pictures that have a strange, disorienting 3D effect.  Deakins' pulls focus often, shifting back and forth between planes in the image, and, often, the pictures are blurry.  Deakins is a great cameraman and Villeneuve indulges him only with respect to grandiose shots of the sky over El Paso and Juarez -- there is always an enormous thunderstorm charged with electricity hovering over the horizon and sheets of rain fall only to be imprisoned as green-black bars hanging overhead in the sky; a terrifying storm is always underway but somewhere half a hundred miles distant from where the camera is placed.  Villeneuve is a master of creating atmosphere -- in Enemy, he made an entire city seem to be trapped in a vast spider's web -- and Sicario is replete with astounding images of meteorological violence suspended in the sky.  Finally, the film is brutalist in its simplified, schematic ideology -- it is undeniably racist -- and its ultimate message is  that good is always defeated, that evil prevails, that no one is virtuous, and that all human effort is futile:  the film is a glossy and carefully packaged advertisement for despair and, on that basis, I question the picture's ultimate morality.  At first, the movie seems to be a picture like Dirty Harry, the movie that Pauline Kael praised (and condemned) as a Fascist work of art -- but Villeneuve is more nuanced; the gung-ho xenophobia that motivates the first half of the film gradually resolves into a something, even, more problematic, that is, a pervasive sense of amoral hopelessness. 

Outside the spell of the movie, many of Sicario's effects can be questioned.  With a million square miles of totally empty desert and mountain all around, why do the Mexican bad guys spend the time and energy to secrete the decomposing bodies of their victims in the walls of the suburban house?  Probably, the sequence is intended as allegorical, the notion of rot that has entered into the very interstices of our homes (again a metaphor that Trump would relish) but it doesn't make any sense logically.  The cross-border raid into Juarez, a brilliantly staged set-piece in the film, is like something from Black Hawk Down -- it seems to me that there would be a lot of easier ways to transfer a Mexican bad guy from Juarez prison to El Paso without convoys of soldiers, armed cops, armored personnel vehicles, all of this leading to a bloody gunbattle in traffic jam on the cross-border bridge.  Why wasn't the bad guy helicoptered away?  It seems that the convoy used to extract the killer from Juarez City attracts about as much attention as the Pope's motorcade -- that is, the strategy seems self-defeating.  An early scene involves a series of illegal questions posed by government administrators -- the questions are all directed at Emily Blunt's marital and family status, clearly expository, but, also, the sort of inquiries that no government official would dare make since to pose such questions (and, then, to act upon the answers) would violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.   I've know enough governmental human resources types to cringe at the illegality of the screening questions directed to the female protagonist.  The final sequence involves the heroine being confronted with the kind of magical document that exists only in movies -- signing the document is supposed to be some kind of irrevocable act that denies a person any recourse to later contest the document.  As a lawyer, of course, I know that documents of this kind don't exist and could not possibly have the effect posited in the movie -- such a writing is merely a plot device.  Finally, a threatened shooting in the film's last half-minute is implausible because it is after dark and the characters are standing so far apart that I think it would be unlikely that a shot fired from a handgun would hit the proposed target.

Despite these reservations, I recommend the film.  It certainly entranced the audience at the showing that I attended.  On its face, the movie is similar to Zero Dark Thirty -- both films feature lots of scruffy special forces snipers, night-vision sequences, brutal CIA agents, and, even, an idealistic heroine.  But Villeneuve's movie is the real thing -- the gory, brutal, and despairing film to which the poorly designed and meretricious Zero Dark Thirty aspired.