Denis Villeneuve (2015)
‘You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.’
These are the last words of Sicario. They’re spoken by Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), a former Juárez lawyer who’s now working with a US Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (SFOD-D) unit on the trail of Mexican drug cartel bosses. During the previous half hour of the film, we’ve learned that Alejandro’s wife and daughter were murdered by a drug lord called Fausto Alarcón (Julio Cedillo); and we’ve watched Alejandro dispense lethal retribution, shooting Alarcón’s security guards in order to gain access to his mansion – then putting a bullet in the head of each member of the family, whose dinner Alejandro has interrupted: Alarcón’s two young sons, his wife and finally the man himself. Alejandro’s closing words of advice are addressed to Kate Macer (Emily Blunt). At the start of Sicario, Kate is the intrepid leader of an FBI team in Arizona, responsible for armed intervention in drugs-related ‘hostage situations’. Kate’s FBI boss (Victor Garber) recommends her to Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a CIA officer working undercover as the head of the SFOD-D team. In the kidnap raid they carry out in the opening sequence of Sicario, Kate’s team discover dozens of corpses immured within the house they’ve entered; then two officers are killed by an improvised explosive device in the yard behind the house. When asked if she’s willing to volunteer for a transfer to Graver’s team, Kate says yes. She wants to help bring to justice those responsible for the carnage she’s recently experienced.
The word ‘sicario’ is a term used in Mexico for ‘hitman’ but an introductory legend on the screen supplies a deeper historical etymology: we’re told that ‘sicario‘ derives from the Hebrew word for Jewish Zealots who killed occupying Romans. Quite how this maps onto the political geography of the film is murky. What’s very clear is that Denis Villeneuve and Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the screenplay, believe that the audience for Sicario, like the principled Kate Macer, needs to be educated – however brutal the process of education may be – about the real, dirty world that she enters. In a pivotal episode in the film, Kate, suspecting that Alejandro is working for the Colombian Medellín Cartel, tries to arrest him; he shoots at her bulletproof vest and dismisses her contemptuously. When she demands an explanation from Matt Graver, she’s told that the SFOD-D operation aims to restore power to the Medellín Cartel so that it is largely in control of the drug trade. A single cartel, Graver says, allows a greater degree of order than competing factions and is the best that the US can currently hope for. Sicario, in other words, does for the fight against international drug cartels what plenty of films, over the decades, have done for international espionage – it illustrates that underhand, morally objectionable strategies are the only realistic way of thwarting something much worse. (According to Wikipedia, the Medellín Cartel, a network of drug suppliers and smugglers originating in the Colombian city of Medellín, ceased to exist as such in the mid-1990s although ‘legacy’ organisations are still going strong. The movie appears to be set in the present day so I assume the role in the story of what’s technically a defunct outfit is an expression of legal circumspection on the part of the film-makers.)
There’s a consistent chauvinism and racial stereotyping in Sicario. It may seem a progressive step that the lead role in a ‘serious’ political thriller is female – until you realise that the men behind Sicario see it as essential to have a woman as proxy for the naively conscientious viewer that the film needs to put wise. (This is more than one step back from, say, Zero Dark Thirty.) While presenting Matt Graver as a self-satisfied, insensitive bastard, Denis Villeneuve and Taylor Sheridan seem to admire him for facing up to reality and enjoining Kate Macer to do the same. Graver isn’t interested in recruiting Kate’s FBI partner, Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya), to the SFOD-D team but Kate wants him to stick around to give her emotional support – a plot move that confirms her status as a vulnerable woman and Reggie’s as a black sidekick. The police officer Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández) is a drug mule for the cartel boss but also – since he’s Mexican and not a drug lord – a simple soul at heart: we’re shown that Silvio would really rather be with his family, eating homely Mexican food and kicking a football round with his son. (In the last scene of the film, Silvio’s widow is one of a group of Mexican women watching their boys play soccer then looking up anxiously at the sound of gunfire that’s not too far away …) Alejandro may be a deadly gunman but the faux-poetical flavour of his parting verbal shot reflects a different Hispanic cliché: you wouldn’t catch Matt Graver talking fancy about ‘a land of wolves’.
The body count in Sicario is appallingly high – it has to be, given the subject and Denis Villeneuve’s approach: if you flinch at the bloodshed and torture, he seems to be saying, you’re a moral weakling. As in his 2013 film Prisoners, Villeneuve is not inclined to build up gradually to the revelation of how bad things are: with the help of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music, he tells his story, from start to finish, in a relentlessly grim register. Roger Deakins’s fine cinematography helps Villeneuve more expressively: the images of a world beyond hope or solution are mysterious as well as depressing – especially the aerial shots of landscape. The actors do their job well. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that Emily Blunt’s talents were being largely wasted; that Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro were very obvious casting for the roles they play; and that Daniel Kaluuya – though it’s good that he’ll be noticed through appearing in a big movie – was doing more creative work as Parking Pataweyo in Harry & Paul a few years ago.
22 October 2015
