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| Sicario (2015) |
Sicario is one of those films. It gets under your skin because it plays out its narrative slowly and surely with a fiery intensity, and then sucker punches you for being naive enough to even entertain the thought of a happy ending. It is cynical and unflinchingly brutal. The Ecclesiastes, if you will, of action-thrillers, reminding us that there is one fate for both the righteous and the wicked—death.
This kind of cynicism ensures that Sicario works on the same visceral level as the old film noirs of classic cinema, though the color pallet here is decidedly different. A teacher once asked me what color I saw as I read The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. The answer was yellow. I had flashbacks to that novel when watching Sicario. Just like the film noirs make extensive use of lighting, color plays a central role in this film. Yellow permeates Sicario in various shades, painting a canvas that is, at turns, brilliant and blazing, pale and sickly.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the film is a masterclass of filmmaking in that it accomplishes what I consider to be the holy grail of cinema: the ability to marry image with theme. There are certain filmmakers who have this astonishing ability to really capture the essence of a story in a single shot, and then do it over and over again throughout the movie. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, and the scene at the beginning in which Indiana Jones first steps out of the shadows. And again when Jones and the diggers, racing to uncover the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis, unearth the Well of Souls. Jones is silhouetted against the blazing sun, the diggers are singing their foreign tune, and the scene has forever been seared into my mind. In that moment, I know exactly how I'm supposed to feel: entranced, exotic, transported to this other time, this other place. The scene is brief, but captures the essence of what the Indiana Jones films are about: adventure. And I'm left wondering just what is about to be uncovered, and what mysteries are yet to be discovered beneath those forgotten sands. This, I believe, is a hallmark of a truly great filmmaker. And Villeneuve has this ability in spades.
There is a sequence in Sicario when protagonist Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) finds herself in a caravan traveling across the border into Ciudad Juárez as part of a special task force assembled by the Department of Justice. She is as much in the dark about the operational details as the viewer. All she knows is that they are going to extradite a high-ranking member of the Sonora Cartel. As the caravan ventures into Mexico, wide, sweeping shots of the caravan weaving through desolate, dangerous streets reinforce the theme of isolation and emptiness that runs throughout the film. Macer, though surrounded by allies in the caravan, truly is alone in enemy territory. And I could practically feel the loneliness, the tension, as I watched the scene play out.
Macer is the viewer's window into this dangerous world. We know as much as she does about what's going on at any given point in time. Part of the film's tension comes in her learning that she has been intentionally left out of the loop as to what her special task force is actually doing when it comes to the drug war. Headed up by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a cocky specialist with an affinity for flip-flops, the task force continues to take bigger and bigger risks that clash with Macer's morals. Like us, she begins asking, essentially, "How far is too far?" She finds an unexpected ally in a mysterious man also attached to the task force, Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). There are certain actors who are born to play particular roles, and del Toro is perfectly cast as the wolfish Gillick, whose quiet, soft-spoken demeanor belies a deadly intent. At one point, Gillick suggests that Macer is like his own daughter, and we, like Macer, foolishly believe that she has formed some kind of bond with this silent titan of a man. Of course, by story's end, the truth is revealed. Gillick is exposed as the stone cold killer that he is, a man who is more than just a part of the world Macer is looking to bring down, but is, in fact, one of the men responsible for establishing that world's perverted status quo. And to Macer's horror, it turns out her own government is working with this man, to establish an older, more evenhanded cartel with which deals can be cut, and understandings can be reached. And when Macer threatens to tell the world of this perverse plan, it is Gillick himself who threatens her life until she gives in, and signs off on the documentation stating that all the task force did was completely legal and within the confines of the law.
Sicario is an exercise in futility. It perfectly embodies the Christian doctrine of reprobation, which tells us that bad people can do good things (like when Gillick at one point saves Macer's life), and still be bad people because inside they are rotten to the core. And bad people ultimately get what they deserve, even if it looks like they get away clean in the end. Gillick walks away with his life and government-approved freedom, despite murdering an entire family (including two young, innocent children) while the family sits down to dinner. Of course, we have spent the entire movie learning that he is empty inside, a shell of a human being. He might think he's walking away clean, but we know he's just as dirty as the bad men he's spent the movie killing. Macer compromises her morals and lets him get away, and then neglects to shoot him when given the chance. It's enough to make us rage at the screen.
It is telling that the first time I viewed Sicario, I walked away feeling cheated. I didn't like the ending. It took several rewatches and a lot of processing before I came around to thinking it's one of the best movies to come out in the past twenty years. There is a kind of dark poetry to the way the whole affair plays out, and writer Taylor Sheridan cracks the hardest storytelling code of all by crafting a story that ends on a wholly unexpected but somehow inevitable note. Having watched the film, when you go back and watch it again, you can see that the ending was etched in stone from the movie's opening moments, yet the quality of the movie-making somehow keeps you under its spell to the point where the ending takes you completely by surprise—not because it's unpredictable, but because it's just so unrelentingly brutal. Sicario is a dark film about dark things, about twisted motivations and lies masquerading as cheap and easy truth. But it is one of those films that allows you to emerge on the other side cleansed, having faced an evil so great and undiluted that our morality is jumpstarted. It makes you shake your fist at the screen and cry out for justice to be done.
And that in and of itself is a victory. We are slapped awake, and we go back to our complicated lives having had our sense of right and wrong restored. We have seen a great and terrible darkness, and that makes us appreciate the light all the more.
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