Breaking the silence about narcotics smuggling
Director Denis Villeneuve hopes the violence in Sicario will stir a needed discussion
CANNES, FRANCE— The perils of being taken for a dove in “the land of the wolf” make Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario more than just another violent thriller dominated by men.
“Dove” could describe the peaceable Villeneuve, but in the film’s context it’s actress Emily Blunt, whose upright FBI agent Kate Macer is the complex central figure of the Quebec director’s dark, twisting and timely Palme d’Or contender, which premiered to raves Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival. ( Sicario is to open Sept. 27 in Toronto theatres, possibly after a stop at TIFF.)
Macer isn’t afraid to use her gun or to charge headfirst into danger. She proves this in the terrifying opening scene: an FBI raid on a Mexican drug cartel lair near Phoenix, Ariz., reveals a house of horrors, with dozens of bodies of kidnapped and executed victims packed into the walls.
Her cool efficiency in the raid, and in previous kidnapping cases, draws the attention of cynical and tightlipped U.S government operatives, who want her to volunteer to assist them in a bold plan to cross the U.S.Mexico border to take out a Mexican cartel kingpin, using one of his top underlings as bait.
The volunteering aspect is crucial, Macer soon learns, because very little of what she’s being asked to do seems to jibe with correct police procedure or the rule of law. Her involvement implies complicity, even though no one is willing to tell her exactly what the plan is.
And she’ll have to work while surrounded by arrogant and patronizing males, among them smirking Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who seems to enjoy killing way too much, and taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a former Mexican prosecutor of no last name who now apparently works as a freelance fixer on both sides of the border.
None of this sits well with Macer, who is appalled by how her new associates empty their machine guns into two carloads of men they suspect to be a threat.
At the same time, she grudgingly agrees with Graver that his unorthodox methods hit the cartels faster and harder than the lawful ones used by the FBI, which has been reduced to the role of janitor, cleaning up after rising acts of cross-border carnage instead of stopping them.
Macer’s abhorrence of gunplay and insistence on due process makes her seem almost Canadian, which helps explain why the grey-bearded Villeneuve, 47, a Montrealer originally from a small town near Trois-Rivières, Que., felt so attracted to the story. The shadows and deceptions of Sicario skilfully expand on Ville- neuve’s continuing fascination with the intersection of humanity’s lighter and darker sides, which he explored in the Oscar-nominated Incendies in 2010 and also in his recent films Prisoners and Enemy. He’s once again working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, who also shot Prisoners and who shares Villeneuve’s love of shadowy themes.
Mexico has violent drug cartels because there are willing buyers of illegal drugs just across the U.S. border “and as a North American I know that I share a part of the responsibility for that,” Villeneuve said.
“And that violence is under a cover of silence. I think that violence is horrible, but violence under silence is more horrible.”
He agreed with a journalist’s suggestion that Sicario may rekindle debate about the use of violence and deception to fight terror, often under a mantra that “the end justifies the means.” A similar debate erupted several years ago over Zero Dark Thirty, a film that bears comparison to Sicario and one that many claimed seemed to endorse the use of torture as an anti-terror tool.
Titled for the Spanish word for hit man, Sicario doesn’t provide any easy answers, Villeneuve said. But it does ask questions that need to be asked.
“I think it’s true that we’re living in a period of time where grey zones are more blurred than ever. That’s why I was so attracted to this project.” Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm