Rating: 4.5/5
Guerrilla warfare in film demands a well-crafted sense of uneasiness, and the newest “guerrilla war” movie “Sicario” does just that. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, the movie portrays the messiness of drug warfare at the U.S.-Canadian border by following one FBI agent’s enlistment (Emily Blunt) in a government task force. Villeneuve (known for “Incendies” (2010), “Prisoners” (2013), and “Enemy” (2013)) uses brown and beige colors well to depict the Mexican landscape, showing a drug underworld without clear order. “Sicario” seems messy, but its ambiguity is its strength; rather than define the drug cartel world from the inside, Villeneuve accentuates the U.S. forces’ struggle to find order, and use of chaos instead.
A struggle to define the rules of engagement becomes apparent by how violence is seen by the characters. Blunt’s character (Kate Macer) initially engages in the drug war as an FBI agent, acting on official protocol. She is very close to the action, seeing her aggressors eye to eye as soldiers. Yet as she goes deeper into the war, her role becomes more ambiguous. She gets wrapped up in a larger group of “advisors,” a government task force separate from the FBI. Legality soon becomes, as you may imagine, complicated. Shootouts occur based on suspicions or glimpses of guns in the backseat of a car stopped at the border. Cars, windows, and dust obstruct clear images of an aggressor, effectively communicating the messiness of the drug war; the cartel may have a boss, but determining the “soldiers” is incredibly difficult. Macer even notices a cartel member in their car’s side mirror, making it seem as if a threat can come from anywhere.
In addition to using barriers to obstruct clear delineations of “sides,” Macer and her fellow agents also view drug violence from a distance. Following an intense, intimate gunfight that day, one of the task force agents invites Macer to climb on a roof overlooking the city of Juarez, Mexico, where most of the drug violence occurs. They see explosions, hear the peppering of gunfire, yet, unlike before, this violence has no face. Like the agents, the movie suggests we can’t understand the true nature of drug warfare, just that it happens. The film takes this distance to an extreme as their mission progresses, watching some scenes through a helicopter’s thermal camera as it separates the soldiers in white contrast to a dark, black landscape. Seeing violence both intimately and from afar creates a great sense of unpredictability, and “Sicario” does well to create incredible suspense in anticipation of violence, versus the violence itself.
There is gore in this world, but it is viewed briefly often without explanation. As Macer first enters Juarez, the city most well known for notorious drug violence, she sees its atrocities from their car, moving quickly past them. Mutilated bodies hang under a bridge, posters of missing children are taped onto cement buildings; like Macer, we don’t get any explanation for why these atrocities happen. Tortures also occur, but we only see the aftermath, or in one instance hear it as the camera looks down a drain in the middle of the room. Villeneuve brings distinct attention to violence, but then quickly moves on, as if life around the border accepts the drug war as inevitable. Soccer games go on, families cope, and people adapt. The sounds of the movie model this sense of life going on, often using mostly background sounds to convey the film’s most tense moments. Lack of music, or just hearing crickets, become terrifying as we wait for the inevitable violence to unfold.
“Sicario” brings the viewer very intimately into a world we know little about, and explores the drug war in a way that questions modern terms of engagement and the government’s role in modern warfare. Sides are ambiguous, and the “enemy” isn’t always clear. Villeneuve effectively brings attention to atrocity without defining it, instead asking the honest question, “what are the implications of addressing something we can’t explain?”
“Sicario” is playing at various times daily at Tinseltown, with student prices on Tuesday. Check back next week for the new, highly anticipated installment of the Bond series, “Spectre.”