3.5 morally-ambiguous-military-operations out of 4
It doesn’t take very long for director Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario to throw off its action-thriller label, in favour of something more thoughtful and thought-provoking. The moment is in the film’s first scene—a stunning sequence where a SWAT van bursts through a wall, and the officers inside realize that the conventions of their world have been irrevocably flipped on their heads. Sicario is an action-thriller in name only. Its political trappings, its ambiguous take on American nationalism, and its oblique take on America’s war on drugs are the themes that serve as the film’s most thrilling points.
Make no mistake, however, Villeneuve’s direction injects much-needed moments of action into an otherwise captivating moral film. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Villeneuve avoids filming with a handheld device. As a result, every scene in his film feels perfectly scripted and captured. For those who argue that action cinema can only truly be captured with an unsteady, unsure, shaky hand, Villeneuve’s film presents the argument that an audience can easily be thrilled with attention-grabbing and steady shot production.
What Villeneuve does—and what other directors must learn to emulate—is the establishment of a sequence’s—and therefore a setting’s—parameters and restrictions. Each of Sicario’s notable set pieces connect with the audience precisely because the audience understands the rules of engagement—and the actors’ placement in relation to the action. Because we can follow Sicario’s characters, we understand what can fall apart. Knowledge, in Villeneuve’s visual dictionary, is not a handicap—it’s an advantage to be manipulated.
The film’s plot is quite standard, but a script by Taylor Sheridan ensures that Sicario avoids the pitfalls of similar pseudo-propaganda productions. I use the term propaganda quite literally. In the hands of another director, in the hands of another writer, and in the hands of a different cast, Sicario could very easily have become yet another ode to American nationalism. Under Villeneuve, Sheridan, and a cast led by Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, Sicario becomes a maudlin dissection of America’s international policy.
Sicario’s central conceit is not dissimilar from the film’s Paul Greengrass or Clint Eastwood. Their movies deal with morally ambiguous characters forced to participate in a world beyond their control or understanding. Unlike their films, that suggest that America is faced with moral battles worth fighting, Villeneuve repeatedly argues that America’s moral wars have no end and no victor.
Blunt takes the lead role as Kate Macer—an FBI agent asked to join an anti-cartel team led by Brolin’s Matt Graver. Brolin’s character, joined by del Toro’s Alejandro Gillick, takes on the role of Kate’s mentor. At least, that’s what his role in other similar films would entail. Instead, Kate resists Graver’s cloying insistence that success in their particular mission depends on shrugging off one’s assumptions of morality. As Gillick, a Spanish-speaking lawyer-cum-terminator, del Toro positions himself on the fine line between humanitarian and sadist.
The ambiguity of the film’s cast—which is to say, the fact that none of the American agents can be trusted—is Sicario’s greatest asset. The audience connects with Kate’s idealism immediately, but we’re also forced to accept that we, much like Kate, don’t understand the rules of this universe either. Manipulative is the manner in which Sicario asks its audience to challenge the actions of characters, only to reveal underlying motivations moments later.
Additionally, a moment should be taken to praise Roger Deakins, the film’s cinematographer. Sicario is a stunning film filled with stunning shots. Fluorescent lighting in an interrogation cell, a sunny day at the Mexican-American border, and a country bar have never seemed so insidious and so sinister. However, Deakins’s best work is on a scene near the film’s conclusion. Utilizing a combination of natural lighting, thermal photography, and a night-vision lens, Deakins maintains the suspenseful tone of the sequence until the brutal, menacing end. There are cinematographers whose work is noteworthy, there are cinematographers whose work complements that of their director, and then there are cinematographers like Deakins—individuals who painstakingly pour time and effort over every sequence, in order to produce something remarkable.
Sicario, in short, is action cinema for the modern age. It is calculating, methodical, and mathematical in its execution—a film for audiences craving equal parts violence and theory on international policy.