Quebec director Villeneuve brings Mexico raid to life in Sicario.
The war on drugs is now in its fifth decade, with no sign of a ceasefire in sight. It began with a speech given by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971, and has since then provided justification for millions incarcerated at home and billions in military intervention abroad.
Sicario, a Spanish word that means assassin, is not a documentary. But the story, about a crossborder raid by U.S. forces into Juárez, Mexico, and some of its consequences, could easily have been lifted from the pages of a newspaper — one that deigns to report such things at all, that is.
The film opens on Emily Blunt as agent Kate Macer, member of the FBI’s kidnap-response team, investigating a drug-cartel house in Arizona, about 250 kilometres from the Mexican border. It’s — what’s the opposite of a safe house? Its walls are full of bodies, and a booby trap leads to several more in police casualties.
Macer’s role in the raid leads to her being noticed and then recruited by higher-up, more enigmatic law-enforcement types. Chief among them is Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a man of indeterminate but clearly extensive power — flipflops and wrinkled wardrobe notwithstanding. Nobody turns to face him when he enters a room, but you’d be rash to turn your back on him. He’s the nearest thing to comic relief, but laugh at your peril.
Brolin speaks in half-sentences and riddles, and forestalls followup questions by being able to fall asleep before you can frame one. But he’s transparent as a glass of water compared to Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), his Colombian adjunct, who dresses better and speaks less. “You’re asking me how the watch works,” Alejandro tells Kate in one of his longer speeches. “For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.”
Kate joins their team because she’s tired of cleaning up after the cartels and would like to help clean them out instead. But their first mission — a trip into Juárez that plays out like an international smash-and-grab — has her shaken and disturbed by their idiom, which Matt openly admits is “to dramatically overreact.”
Del Toro has been in this milieu before, starring in Steven Soderbergh’s excellent 2000 drug drama, Traffic. But while that film cast a wide net, with stories of agents, cops, judges and even drug users, Sicario focuses on the front line, a frontier so far forward and so fluid that, as Kate’s FBI boss tells her: “The boundary has been moved.”
The only problem is that no one ever says exactly where its new location is.
Quebec director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Prisoners) has gathered a nest of tyro and tested talents to realize his vision. Representing the newcomers is Taylor Sheridan, a first-time screenwriter best known for his acting role on TV’s Sons of Anarchy.
Iceland’s Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the score (as he did on Prisoners), an almost overpowering soundscape laid over top of a beat that your heart will follow. And cinematographer Roger Deakins — a familiar of the Coen brothers and now, it seems, of Villeneuve as well — provides stark views of the landscape, moral ambiguity somehow rendered in a desert palette of ochre and brown.
The visuals work well in scales both large and small. Take the shot of five U.S. government-issued SUVs, hood-to-tailpipe as they race across the Mexican border: Shot from the air, they resemble an angry black snake preparing to strike.
Or observe the scene of an interrogation room where Alejandro is about to ask some hard questions of a captured drug intermediary.
A guard says he’s going to step out for a moment, and absentmindedly turns off a video camera on the way out. The site of a single pixel dimming from red to black tells you all you need to know about how the scene will play out. Villeneuve doesn’t even show us what happens next, yet it remains one of the most frightening moments in a movie this year.
Kate is our window into this world, mirroring the confusion and slowly dawning dread that many viewers will feel.
“Nothing will make sense to your American ears,” Alejandro says. “And you will doubt everything that we do. But in the end you will understand.”
And we do, although with that understanding comes the realization of the gap between comprehending a problem and being able to solve it. Sicario, a thriller with a heart and a conscience, is also too smart to pretend it has any answers.