Drug thriller like no other
To say that “Sicario” is about the drug war along the Mexican border makes it sound like a dozen other movies: A young FBI agent with a score to settle joins up on a secret mission to undermine a drug kingpin. But in the handling of that story, in the places it goes and the ways in which it’s filmed, “Sicario” is impressive from beginning to end.
It has a screenplay of freshness and audacity that’s brought to life by a director who understands its every psychological undercurrent. We
might hope this kind of thing would happen all the time, but it’s rare. Denis Villeneuve knows what to emphasize, and he knows how to create a mood simply through camera placement and movement. No scene in “Sicario” is merely functional. Nothing is tossed off. Within minutes, maybe seconds, the world of this film envelops you, and there’s no escaping it.
The first hint that “Sicario” is something exceptional comes in the first sequence, in which the FBI agent, Kate (Emily Blunt), leads her team on a drug bust in Arizona. The sights and the perspectives are unexpected: They don’t come through the door. They make their entrance by bulldozing through a wall. And then the scene resolves in the discovery of horrors best left undescribed here.
Director Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan are in harmony on the film’s essential point, that the horrors depicted in “Sicario” are also horrors of the spirit. This is not good guys and bad guys warring over their conflicting interests. This about the outer reaches of human depravity and iniquity, and how just witnessing the fruits of it can erode the soul. And the brilliance of “Sicario” is that it presents unspeakable things in a workaday way, with no elevation to make sense of it all.
Following the Arizona bust, the young agent volunteers for a secret mission, alongside a CIA operative ( Josh Brolin) and a Mexican mystery man (Benicio Del Toro). But she is treated like a junior partner and isn’t told anything. If you see the film, notice how the placement of the camera emphasizes Kate’s perspective. She sits in the back of a room at a briefing, and Villeneuve never brings the camera in for a close-up of the man conducting it. Villeneuve stays in the back with Kate, who can barely follow along.
Later, she is on a private plane with Del Toro, but Villeneuve never really gives us an establishing shot of the plane’s interior so that we feel at home in it. Instead, he cuts from closeups of Del Toro to close-ups of Blunt, so that we feel Kate’s isolation and the close confinement of the small jet.
From there, there’s a sequence in Juarez, which mostly consists of the three main characters driving around with a fourth operative, played by Jeffrey Donovan. Notice that Donovan never gets a close-up, and we barely see his face, because he’s sitting in the front seat of the car, and Kate is sitting in back. And notice also how that makes Donovan’s character more strange and compelling. The whole Juarez sequence — a simple thing; they have to move a prisoner across the border to a U.S. facility — is brilliant, a study in compressed tension.
If at any point in “Sicario,” you feel lost, don’t worry about it. The movie is all about being lost and, in any case, all becomes clear, eventually. The filmmakers take the conventional genre of a drug thriller to make an unconventional point — or a feeling more than a point. The intention seems less to say something about the drug war than it is to show what people are capable of, and to capture an emotional and psychological condition. If you get the feeling, you’ve understood the movie.
As for the actors, they are everything they need to be, but this one was the director’s show all the way. They must have felt in very good hands.