Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "sicario"
Sicario
If you'd like to see a study in tension-building, please watch Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The first time I watched it, I couldn't remember anybody's name, or how the plot had progressed, even directly after finishing it, but the consistent tone of tightness or tension left its mark on me, so I watched it two more times in the span of a week.
Much has been said about this movie already. I saw pieces about the city of Juarez protesting it, criticisms of its focus on Americans rather than Mexicans, and even an interesting take on the protagonist's journey as a rape in the abstract.
Here is the plot in a nutshell: FBI agent Kate Macer (played by Emily Blunt) joins a secret team aiming to take out a high-level drug kingpin in Mexico. However, she is kept from knowing most of the details until the very end.
With her is smarmy "DOD advisor" Matt (Josh Brolin) and taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), and to a lesser extent her fellow agent Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya).
*SPOILERS FOLLOW*
The movie is lean and features memorable set pieces, such as a firefight on the Bridge of the Americas, a night-vision raid outside Juarez, and a bloody climax in a Mexican drug mansion. Tension is the theme of the day here, boosted by Johann Johannsson's fucked-up apocalyptic score, which sort of acts like its own character to me.
Dread, horror, suspense, discomfort. These words all apply to many scenes of the movie, but never in excess. This is a film that seems to eschew excess for momentum, although some scenes, such as a mass interrogation of illegal immigrants, and the freezing of a drug dealer's bank accounts, dragged on for me. Still, those are minor points, and the two hours of the film go by pretty damn quickly.
Some highlights: beautiful shots of the American-Mexican scrubland, mutilated corpses hanging from a Juarez bridge, and the aforementioned Bridge of the Americas scene, which features tattooed gangsters and Kevlar'd Special Ops agents.
One of the weaknesses, as has been described before, is the lack of focus on the Mexicans affected by the drug trade, and this is a valid criticism. We have a mini-story of a corrupt Mexican police officer who works with the cartel, but who also has a son and wife he loves and wants to protect. This piece, while it sincerely tries to be honest and heartfelt, mostly fails due to the screentime ratio. It feels like an add-on, but having said this, I am sympathetic to it, because the movie would be even more whitewashed without it.
"Whitewashing" is a serious debate in today's movie world, at least as far as I am aware in my decidedly unglamorous cubby in Northern Virginia. Benicio del Toro appears to be the rebuttal to any claim of racism, seeing as he becomes the main character, in effect, towards the end of the movie, after we learn he is a hitman from a rival cartel hellbent on getting revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter. The CIA just happens to be a useful vehicle for him to get to the man responsible, a cartel heavy named Fausto Alarcon. Still, this is not really a departure from the cliches of Latino movie characters.
We see Mexico as an object of penetration. US Special Forces, with Kate in tow, surgically enter and carry out missions on Mexican soil. Kate eventually discovers she is kept around only to legally rubber-stamp what turns out to be a bloody and probably illegal series of operations.
Is this just another Hollywood reduction of the drug war to "gutted, violent Mexico and heavily-armed white America"? Pretty much yes, but the tone of unsettled nihilism that runs throughout elevates it into something more morally compromised, and thus better.
I can't pretend to know a lot about movies, but I can say I think most of the exposition was left out to focus on action and tone. We know, for example, that Kate is divorced, but we never move deeply or meaningfully into her past. These details don't matter in this world of Villeneuve's: only the mission.
Most of the characters are ciphers: peacekeepers or gunmen who are defined by the weapons they carry, and by their masculine "hardness." Kate, as the lone female of the bunch, stands as her own representation of toughness, but one with a decidedly more virtuous core. Perhaps it is her status as a relative "outsider" to the drug war: she has only lived in America, and even though she sees things like bomb-rigged mutilated corpses, she doesn't see the "truly" terrible things until she crosses the border.
We know Kate certainly has principles. She tries to prosecute cases "by the book," and threatens to talk when she discovers Alejandro is a cartel member (not another "DOD advisor") being sent to assassinate a rival cartel head.
Some reviews have called this part of the plot ridiculous or foolish. It does feel like something over-the-top: would our government, even the myth-laden branch of the CIA, treat a cartel member like a special agent and use him to kill people?
Well, in 1954, the CIA sent in nearly 500 mercenaries, led by a Guatemalan colonel, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala. So there's that. However, I also found a blog by an ex-Special Forces operator, who brings up the idea that Hollywood assumes the government is in evil-conspiracy mode, when it reality it's usually in "chicken-with-its-head-cut-off" mode.
Realism aside, however, the main takeaway I have from this movie is the treatment of tension. It simmers and builds from the first shot, and it pretty much never stops escalating, although you could cite the illegal immigrant scene and the bank scene as low points.
And that's the point of a thriller, right? After all is said and done, it is supposed to build suspense. This Sicario does very well. As for whether it treats Mexico fairly, or whether it accurately depicts Special Ops missions -- that is up for debate.
I should mention how important it is that the protagonist is female, although I am just regurgitating other writers' ideas. But it is true. Kate's gender seems more striking of an issue when she is constantly lied to and patronized by powerful, knowledge-holding males, mainly CIA operative Matt. Alejandro's patronizing of Kate is more of the "benevolent sexism" type: she reminds him of his murdered daughter.
However, even this "positive sexism" falls away to reveal something more sinister when, at the end of the film, Alejandro puts a gun to Kate's chin and forces her to sign a document saying the whole operation was done "by the book."
Violence is the language of these men, on both sides of the war: Alejandro, Matt, Fausto, Manuel Diaz (a sort of lieutenant in the cartel). I know I mentioned there was no excess, but the violence in this movie is definitely extreme. The "good guys" torture people. The "bad guys" torture people, too. And it is all for ... what? A marginally more "controllable" cartel situation. The futility and hopelessness of the drug war is what first prompts Kate to join the task force where she meets Matt and Alejandro. But by the end of the story, we are not given any hope. The drug war does not seem any closer to being won, an idea that has already become something of a cliche in our war-numbed society.
Sicario is a genre film that excels in its confines, while managing to be a bit surprising in its own way. By keeping Alejandro's mission a secret from us, we don't expect him to be as important as he is revealed to be. In fact, the whole third act is mainly Alejandro's show: he kidnaps the corrupt Mexican cop whom we were briefly introduced to, kills him, kidnaps Manuel Diaz, and then uses him to enter Fausto's guarded complex--all by himself. (Although the Special Ops team helped him in the beginning, and communicate with him once he is solo.)
The "reveal," then, is Alejandro's personal vendetta, and we suddenly jump protagonists into his world for the final scenes. Was this unexpected to me? Yes. Did I feel cheated? Not exactly. I think Kate's character upheld her end of the bargain by being morally uncompromising, so it would never have made sense for her to go on a killing spree like Alejandro does.
However, there is a sense that Villeneuve is giving us the "blood" that a good action thriller demands, and his way of doing that is showing us the actions of someone who is basically the loose cannon of the Colombian cartel.
Kate is our way of standing to the side of the violence, of being horrified by it. Alejandro is the fulfillment of the thriller's deal: we see him kill Fausto, his wife, and his two children at their dinner table, seemingly unchanged, seemingly remorseless.
"Violence begets violence" is yet another cliche, and this one rings true for this movie. Alejandro's family was killed, so he kills Fausto's. "Do you think your wife would be proud of what you've become?" Fausto asks him in his last moments, and Alejandro does not answer that question. He is past considerations such as that: he is committed to vengeance.
The idea of vengeance is very old, and it has been proposed as an essential need of humankind. Not that we should always obtain it, but just that we all feel a desire for it. I have read that vengeance is about making the transgressor understand what he or she did wrong--a deeply emotional understanding created through the infliction of pain.
This Alejandro does when he shoots Fausto's wife and kids first. We don't see them fall, we just see Fausto's horrified expression. Alejandro clearly wants this man to understand what it is like to lose a loved one in a violent way. He wants this so badly he is willing to kill children.
If you say that makes Alejandro a psychopath, I can't fully disagree with you. He commits terrible crimes just to have the chance to commit this even more terrible crime, and then he walks away from it all without any dramatic monologue, without evidence of regret. He is a self-proclaimed "wolf," and he tells Kate "this is the land of wolves now." Kate, something other than a wolf, cannot survive in the "real world" where things like laws don't matter. This is classic cynical Hollywood tale-telling, with references to "how things are really done" in the world. I suppose it can't help but owe a debt to the violent, government-suspicious thrillers of the '60s and '70s. (Alan J. Pakula, perhaps.)
But these are just my half-baked neophyte ideas on film history. What I'm more interested in is the tension, the atmosphere, the tone, the music, and the decision to "jump ship" out of Kate's perspective and show us Alejandro's world for the final few minutes of the movie.
In a way, this is a movie about innocence. Everyone is corrupted to some degree, from Matt to Alejandro, and so when we lave Kate, when we leave our moral anchor and just see Alejandro on his "mission," we see the full loss of innocence. This is America killing people in a foreign country using a drug cartel's hitman.
Obviously, a story like that would make a few headlines if that was ever discovered to be true, although a cynical agent in Juarez quips, after the Bridge of the Americas firefight leaves Kate bewildered and angry, "This won't even make the papers in El Paso," highlighting either the ignorance of the American public to Mexican events, or the violence-benumbed indifference they have towards the war on drugs.
And furthermore, Matt cites as the real reason for the cartels the fact that "20% of Americans" won't stop "smoking and shooting this shit," namely: drugs. So many of us are complicit, are compromised. We read about the cartels' violence online and feel disgusted, but we don't see how we participate in the cycle.
It's also interesting that this movie does not show any drug use (unlike Traffic). It is only about the war on drugs. And the war on drugs, Sicario tells us, is truly a war, with spies, automatic weapons, and innocent casualties.
My final points are about tension-building. As far as I can tell, Vileneuve achieves this through good editing and music, as well as powerful images. I think the most striking picture is the mutilated corpses hanging from the bridge in Juarez (itself considered somewhat of a cliche, albeit a horrifying and sad one, by now). As a tangent, this movie seems to embrace its cliches and, to some degree, overcomes them. That image of those bodies is seared in my mind, paired as it is with the deeply disturbing score and Alejandro's terse "Welcome to Juarez." That scene should have felt laughable and extremely cliched--how many times have you heard an actor say "Welcome to X" after some violent or shocking scene plays out?--but it did not. Part of this is the solid acting, since everyone nails their clipped, militant seriousness, but it's also due to self-awareness. Sicario knows the tropes of thrillers and accepts them, while also trying to provide them as best as it can--sort of like Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.
And much like The Maltese Falcon (the book version), we are introduced to a cynical, violent, morally gray world where people's inner thoughts are not made privy to us. Much like this book, we are given a genre piece that aims to be something higher, and mostly achieves it. It doesn't throw in an extra romance for the sake of audience pleasing, or delve into the always-traumatized backstories of the main characters. It just shows us the mission. The mission is all, and the mission is ethically wrong, and the mission is futile, at least seen in the grand scope of this conflict.
Sicario is about violent men forcing other men to be violent, and one woman being disgusted by it. This is summed up when Kate draws a gun on Alejandro at the very end, but can't bring herself to shoot him, to transgress the laws she actually somehow believes in. She is not a wolf. And the movie raises the question: how much of our world is governed by wolves? And this seems to beg the next question: what do we non-wolves do in it? And Alejandro's answer is: "Move to a small town where the rule of law still exists."
Now, is this all a bit over-dramatized? The idea of the crumbling, lawless urban empire is another cliche at this point, and the idea of the world being governed by nothing but lawbreaking and brutal violence is another old one. It's certainly popular fodder for fatalists, pessimists, and dystopia-philes. And in fact, Juarez's murder rate has decreased significantly since 2010, when over 3,000 murders occurred in the city limits. (I think under 600 last year.) People have used the word "revival" when they talk about Juarez now, and it seems to be at least somewhat true.
But if, like Matt tells Kate near the climax, "Medellin refers to a time" when the CIA had a degree of control over the cartels, this movie refers to a time when the drug cartels ran almost everything south of our border, and maybe, just maybe, the US suspended the rule of law to try and stop it.
And we're still at war, right?
Much has been said about this movie already. I saw pieces about the city of Juarez protesting it, criticisms of its focus on Americans rather than Mexicans, and even an interesting take on the protagonist's journey as a rape in the abstract.
Here is the plot in a nutshell: FBI agent Kate Macer (played by Emily Blunt) joins a secret team aiming to take out a high-level drug kingpin in Mexico. However, she is kept from knowing most of the details until the very end.
With her is smarmy "DOD advisor" Matt (Josh Brolin) and taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), and to a lesser extent her fellow agent Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya).
*SPOILERS FOLLOW*
The movie is lean and features memorable set pieces, such as a firefight on the Bridge of the Americas, a night-vision raid outside Juarez, and a bloody climax in a Mexican drug mansion. Tension is the theme of the day here, boosted by Johann Johannsson's fucked-up apocalyptic score, which sort of acts like its own character to me.
Dread, horror, suspense, discomfort. These words all apply to many scenes of the movie, but never in excess. This is a film that seems to eschew excess for momentum, although some scenes, such as a mass interrogation of illegal immigrants, and the freezing of a drug dealer's bank accounts, dragged on for me. Still, those are minor points, and the two hours of the film go by pretty damn quickly.
Some highlights: beautiful shots of the American-Mexican scrubland, mutilated corpses hanging from a Juarez bridge, and the aforementioned Bridge of the Americas scene, which features tattooed gangsters and Kevlar'd Special Ops agents.
One of the weaknesses, as has been described before, is the lack of focus on the Mexicans affected by the drug trade, and this is a valid criticism. We have a mini-story of a corrupt Mexican police officer who works with the cartel, but who also has a son and wife he loves and wants to protect. This piece, while it sincerely tries to be honest and heartfelt, mostly fails due to the screentime ratio. It feels like an add-on, but having said this, I am sympathetic to it, because the movie would be even more whitewashed without it.
"Whitewashing" is a serious debate in today's movie world, at least as far as I am aware in my decidedly unglamorous cubby in Northern Virginia. Benicio del Toro appears to be the rebuttal to any claim of racism, seeing as he becomes the main character, in effect, towards the end of the movie, after we learn he is a hitman from a rival cartel hellbent on getting revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter. The CIA just happens to be a useful vehicle for him to get to the man responsible, a cartel heavy named Fausto Alarcon. Still, this is not really a departure from the cliches of Latino movie characters.
We see Mexico as an object of penetration. US Special Forces, with Kate in tow, surgically enter and carry out missions on Mexican soil. Kate eventually discovers she is kept around only to legally rubber-stamp what turns out to be a bloody and probably illegal series of operations.
Is this just another Hollywood reduction of the drug war to "gutted, violent Mexico and heavily-armed white America"? Pretty much yes, but the tone of unsettled nihilism that runs throughout elevates it into something more morally compromised, and thus better.
I can't pretend to know a lot about movies, but I can say I think most of the exposition was left out to focus on action and tone. We know, for example, that Kate is divorced, but we never move deeply or meaningfully into her past. These details don't matter in this world of Villeneuve's: only the mission.
Most of the characters are ciphers: peacekeepers or gunmen who are defined by the weapons they carry, and by their masculine "hardness." Kate, as the lone female of the bunch, stands as her own representation of toughness, but one with a decidedly more virtuous core. Perhaps it is her status as a relative "outsider" to the drug war: she has only lived in America, and even though she sees things like bomb-rigged mutilated corpses, she doesn't see the "truly" terrible things until she crosses the border.
We know Kate certainly has principles. She tries to prosecute cases "by the book," and threatens to talk when she discovers Alejandro is a cartel member (not another "DOD advisor") being sent to assassinate a rival cartel head.
Some reviews have called this part of the plot ridiculous or foolish. It does feel like something over-the-top: would our government, even the myth-laden branch of the CIA, treat a cartel member like a special agent and use him to kill people?
Well, in 1954, the CIA sent in nearly 500 mercenaries, led by a Guatemalan colonel, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala. So there's that. However, I also found a blog by an ex-Special Forces operator, who brings up the idea that Hollywood assumes the government is in evil-conspiracy mode, when it reality it's usually in "chicken-with-its-head-cut-off" mode.
Realism aside, however, the main takeaway I have from this movie is the treatment of tension. It simmers and builds from the first shot, and it pretty much never stops escalating, although you could cite the illegal immigrant scene and the bank scene as low points.
And that's the point of a thriller, right? After all is said and done, it is supposed to build suspense. This Sicario does very well. As for whether it treats Mexico fairly, or whether it accurately depicts Special Ops missions -- that is up for debate.
I should mention how important it is that the protagonist is female, although I am just regurgitating other writers' ideas. But it is true. Kate's gender seems more striking of an issue when she is constantly lied to and patronized by powerful, knowledge-holding males, mainly CIA operative Matt. Alejandro's patronizing of Kate is more of the "benevolent sexism" type: she reminds him of his murdered daughter.
However, even this "positive sexism" falls away to reveal something more sinister when, at the end of the film, Alejandro puts a gun to Kate's chin and forces her to sign a document saying the whole operation was done "by the book."
Violence is the language of these men, on both sides of the war: Alejandro, Matt, Fausto, Manuel Diaz (a sort of lieutenant in the cartel). I know I mentioned there was no excess, but the violence in this movie is definitely extreme. The "good guys" torture people. The "bad guys" torture people, too. And it is all for ... what? A marginally more "controllable" cartel situation. The futility and hopelessness of the drug war is what first prompts Kate to join the task force where she meets Matt and Alejandro. But by the end of the story, we are not given any hope. The drug war does not seem any closer to being won, an idea that has already become something of a cliche in our war-numbed society.
Sicario is a genre film that excels in its confines, while managing to be a bit surprising in its own way. By keeping Alejandro's mission a secret from us, we don't expect him to be as important as he is revealed to be. In fact, the whole third act is mainly Alejandro's show: he kidnaps the corrupt Mexican cop whom we were briefly introduced to, kills him, kidnaps Manuel Diaz, and then uses him to enter Fausto's guarded complex--all by himself. (Although the Special Ops team helped him in the beginning, and communicate with him once he is solo.)
The "reveal," then, is Alejandro's personal vendetta, and we suddenly jump protagonists into his world for the final scenes. Was this unexpected to me? Yes. Did I feel cheated? Not exactly. I think Kate's character upheld her end of the bargain by being morally uncompromising, so it would never have made sense for her to go on a killing spree like Alejandro does.
However, there is a sense that Villeneuve is giving us the "blood" that a good action thriller demands, and his way of doing that is showing us the actions of someone who is basically the loose cannon of the Colombian cartel.
Kate is our way of standing to the side of the violence, of being horrified by it. Alejandro is the fulfillment of the thriller's deal: we see him kill Fausto, his wife, and his two children at their dinner table, seemingly unchanged, seemingly remorseless.
"Violence begets violence" is yet another cliche, and this one rings true for this movie. Alejandro's family was killed, so he kills Fausto's. "Do you think your wife would be proud of what you've become?" Fausto asks him in his last moments, and Alejandro does not answer that question. He is past considerations such as that: he is committed to vengeance.
The idea of vengeance is very old, and it has been proposed as an essential need of humankind. Not that we should always obtain it, but just that we all feel a desire for it. I have read that vengeance is about making the transgressor understand what he or she did wrong--a deeply emotional understanding created through the infliction of pain.
This Alejandro does when he shoots Fausto's wife and kids first. We don't see them fall, we just see Fausto's horrified expression. Alejandro clearly wants this man to understand what it is like to lose a loved one in a violent way. He wants this so badly he is willing to kill children.
If you say that makes Alejandro a psychopath, I can't fully disagree with you. He commits terrible crimes just to have the chance to commit this even more terrible crime, and then he walks away from it all without any dramatic monologue, without evidence of regret. He is a self-proclaimed "wolf," and he tells Kate "this is the land of wolves now." Kate, something other than a wolf, cannot survive in the "real world" where things like laws don't matter. This is classic cynical Hollywood tale-telling, with references to "how things are really done" in the world. I suppose it can't help but owe a debt to the violent, government-suspicious thrillers of the '60s and '70s. (Alan J. Pakula, perhaps.)
But these are just my half-baked neophyte ideas on film history. What I'm more interested in is the tension, the atmosphere, the tone, the music, and the decision to "jump ship" out of Kate's perspective and show us Alejandro's world for the final few minutes of the movie.
In a way, this is a movie about innocence. Everyone is corrupted to some degree, from Matt to Alejandro, and so when we lave Kate, when we leave our moral anchor and just see Alejandro on his "mission," we see the full loss of innocence. This is America killing people in a foreign country using a drug cartel's hitman.
Obviously, a story like that would make a few headlines if that was ever discovered to be true, although a cynical agent in Juarez quips, after the Bridge of the Americas firefight leaves Kate bewildered and angry, "This won't even make the papers in El Paso," highlighting either the ignorance of the American public to Mexican events, or the violence-benumbed indifference they have towards the war on drugs.
And furthermore, Matt cites as the real reason for the cartels the fact that "20% of Americans" won't stop "smoking and shooting this shit," namely: drugs. So many of us are complicit, are compromised. We read about the cartels' violence online and feel disgusted, but we don't see how we participate in the cycle.
It's also interesting that this movie does not show any drug use (unlike Traffic). It is only about the war on drugs. And the war on drugs, Sicario tells us, is truly a war, with spies, automatic weapons, and innocent casualties.
My final points are about tension-building. As far as I can tell, Vileneuve achieves this through good editing and music, as well as powerful images. I think the most striking picture is the mutilated corpses hanging from the bridge in Juarez (itself considered somewhat of a cliche, albeit a horrifying and sad one, by now). As a tangent, this movie seems to embrace its cliches and, to some degree, overcomes them. That image of those bodies is seared in my mind, paired as it is with the deeply disturbing score and Alejandro's terse "Welcome to Juarez." That scene should have felt laughable and extremely cliched--how many times have you heard an actor say "Welcome to X" after some violent or shocking scene plays out?--but it did not. Part of this is the solid acting, since everyone nails their clipped, militant seriousness, but it's also due to self-awareness. Sicario knows the tropes of thrillers and accepts them, while also trying to provide them as best as it can--sort of like Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.
And much like The Maltese Falcon (the book version), we are introduced to a cynical, violent, morally gray world where people's inner thoughts are not made privy to us. Much like this book, we are given a genre piece that aims to be something higher, and mostly achieves it. It doesn't throw in an extra romance for the sake of audience pleasing, or delve into the always-traumatized backstories of the main characters. It just shows us the mission. The mission is all, and the mission is ethically wrong, and the mission is futile, at least seen in the grand scope of this conflict.
Sicario is about violent men forcing other men to be violent, and one woman being disgusted by it. This is summed up when Kate draws a gun on Alejandro at the very end, but can't bring herself to shoot him, to transgress the laws she actually somehow believes in. She is not a wolf. And the movie raises the question: how much of our world is governed by wolves? And this seems to beg the next question: what do we non-wolves do in it? And Alejandro's answer is: "Move to a small town where the rule of law still exists."
Now, is this all a bit over-dramatized? The idea of the crumbling, lawless urban empire is another cliche at this point, and the idea of the world being governed by nothing but lawbreaking and brutal violence is another old one. It's certainly popular fodder for fatalists, pessimists, and dystopia-philes. And in fact, Juarez's murder rate has decreased significantly since 2010, when over 3,000 murders occurred in the city limits. (I think under 600 last year.) People have used the word "revival" when they talk about Juarez now, and it seems to be at least somewhat true.
But if, like Matt tells Kate near the climax, "Medellin refers to a time" when the CIA had a degree of control over the cartels, this movie refers to a time when the drug cartels ran almost everything south of our border, and maybe, just maybe, the US suspended the rule of law to try and stop it.
And we're still at war, right?
