Connector Staff
There is a scene about a third of the way through the latest film from director Denis Villenueve (Enemy, Prisoners) in which a teammate on her supposedly Department of Justice-backed squad approaches protagonist Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) and asks her, “You wanna see something cool?” He then leads her up to the rooftop of the nondescript government building on the Texas-Mexico border, hands her a pair of binoculars, and points. Through Kate’s eyes, we see the exchange of what looks like anti-aircraft or tank fire from warring gangs in the city of Juarez, and the flashing lights of scrambling police cars. “Unbelievable,” Kate says. Her teammate thinks it is quite the show.
There are a few moments of similar overt telegraphing of theme in “Sicario,” if none that directly invoke a deleted scene from the original “Star Wars.” You would be forgiven for thinking the film was setting itself up to be a sweeping capital-S statement on the war on drugs. What you get is something not quite as straight-forward.
The film initially follows Blunt’s FBI agent as she joins up with what appears to be a Department of Defense anti-drug taskforce after the death of some of her former teammates in a raid gone awry. Headed by an ominously laconic James Brolin and Benicio del Toro’s soft-spoken Mexican assassin, and staffed with intimidating Delta Force alpha-bros, the suspicions of Blunt’s partner (Daniel Kaluuya) are soon aroused, and the truth ends up slightly more complicated. A nail biting prisoner extraction, a potential one night stand that takes a turn for the sinister, and an astonishing nighttime raid shot entirely in night vision and satellite camera ensue.
Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins used a large, often breathtakingly beautiful canvas to tell a surprisingly small story. The mind-boggling absence of morality and ethics that is the War on Drugs, the history of American imperialism, and the racial oppression of Mexico by the United States serve as a backdrop rather than the focus. Long god’s-eye-view tracking shots of a private jet’s silhouette cutting across the Tex-Mex desert, strictly regimented suburban housing giving way to the wasteland like a slowly encroaching disease, and long shots of oppressively drab government buildings with their perfectly arranged rows upon rows of military hardware are contrasted with the chaotic, thriving sprawl that is Juarez. The sheer futility of the drug war, and the efforts of the cast whether they win or lose, is evident.
The performances of all involved are excellent. Blunt’s increasingly desperate, battered decency and a wonderful turn by Jeffrey Donovan as a nerdy-but-lethal operative are particular stand-outs. Ultimately, however, this is Del Toro’s show. Having reportedly cut down his dialogue to a fraction of what he was given in the script, he goes a good half hour to 45 minutes with barely a word, and needs none. His perpetual hangdog-with-teeth expression, the way he invades the personal space of some of his targets in ways that are just unsettlingly mean; he can instill dread with something as simple as carrying a gallon jug of water down a hallway.
The city of Juarez itself deserves a billing on the poster in its own right. It could be argued Villeneuve falls into the familiar trap of taking a locale riddled with violence, in great part due to the actions of the US, and turning it into an inscrutable, sun-bleached Underworld our protagonists must traverse. Still, the sight of cops armored to the gills with Gatling guns mounted on their trucks as they roll into the city keeps the twin specters of US interventionism and the pervasive militarization of America’s police forces in one’s mind. However horrific the results of the gang murders we are shown, as another character reminds Del Toro’s later in the film, who do you think taught them?
There is another telling moment immediately following the team’s extraction from Juarez, when Blunt finally confronts Brolin about what he is really attempting to do. “I’m not a soldier, this is not what I do,” she says. This is the future, he snaps back. The ultimate tragedy of “Sicario” is: they are both right.
