Sicario

Denis Villeneuve’s slow-burn thriller about Mexican drug cartels stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro

sicarioposterFBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited by the CIA’s Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to help infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. She feels lost and out of bounds, outside of her comfort zone and jurisdiction, and she asks the DoD “consultant” Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) what exactly is their objective. “You’re asking me how a watch works,” Alejandro implies, intricate and detailed yes, but more importantly difficult and near impossible to understand.

“Sicario” is a film about frustration. Like “Zero Dark Thirty” before it, Kate Macer is a woman trying to see in the dark and coming up empty. Denis Villeneuve’s tightly wound thriller binds its main character in confusion, ambiguity and a lack of information. The audience finds only a little more clarity but can feel the slow-burn tension sink in as Kate continues to go deeper, unsure of what she’ll find.

Kate’s most recent raid uncovered a house filled with bodies lining the inside of the drywall, each bound and wrapped in a plastic bag around their head. Despite the gruesome failure of the operation, she’s whisked away by the CIA’s Matt Graver, his flip flops and casual demeanor in stark contrast to her worn and by-the-book dedication to her job.

Matt’s details are scant, and instead of taking her to El Paso, she’s brought along on a job in Mexico. She’s part of a massive convoy that rolls into the country to pick up a cartel prisoner, then crosses back over the border to interrogate him. Villeneuve makes us helpless passengers and reluctant spectators, with the convoy calling complete attention to itself and with sinister looking gang bangers itching their trigger fingers in between rows of civilian traffic at the Mexican-American border. The musical score in this scene has a wonderful low droning of horns and the dragging of chains or stones as a chopper flies by.

The intention of this and several of the film’s operations are never completely clear, but in Benicio Del Toro we get a brilliant character who stands apart from the other agents and strikes fear into everyone on screen. Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan carefully tap into the idea that Kate and everyone else involved are really playing toward his agenda. His ruthless, yet incredibly subdued performance is one of the finer supporting jobs of the year.

This fear of uncertainty of an agenda and of a direction manifests itself brilliantly in a night-vision sequence that recalls and perhaps surpasses “Zero Dark Thirty”. Villeneuve has a different approach to tension and suspense than Kathryn Bigelow. As in “Prisoners” the tension is heavy but it’s a constant, slow burn simmer rather than a gradual build-up and eruption. When Kate and the team put down cartel gunmen at the border, they do so not in a chaotic firefight but in a terse and emotionless takedown.

“Sicario” never finds as compelling of a feminist role for Kate as one might hope, and yet the film is not trying to be a “Silence of the Lambs” story of a woman in a man’s world. Sheridan also tries to build sympathy for a Mexican cop and his family who get caught up in the action, but Villeneuve never earns the real pathos Sheridan is looking for.

Still, “Sicario” is a knockout, a riveting, art house action thriller that’s complex and ambiguous. It’s a film about seeing in the dark, and it’s no wonder the results come out just a little murky.

3 ½ stars

Side by Side: The Double and Enemy

Two films were released this year about people who look identical, but they’re highly different films.

“You’re in my place.” That’s the opening line to “The Double,” and it’s the on-the-nose thesis to both that movie and a similar film also released this year, “Enemy.” In each film, a timid and lonely protagonist comes face to face with a more confident doppelganger, causing the original’s life to unravel.

Two copycat movies in a given year is a jarring coincidence, but to call them doppelgangers of each other would be a misnomer. However, it certainly doesn’t help that both are based off books called “The Double” and that neither is particularly good.

More so than a replica of “Enemy”, “The Double” is actually a pastiche of Orwellian dystopias, most notably Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. Director Richard Ayoade’s first film was yet another cinematic pastiche (or homage if you prefer) called “Submarine” that reimagined the French New Wave with its own dark comedy turns. This new film owes Gilliam a lot, with drab colors and cold, boxy, ‘80s machinery and technology filling every part of the set design. Continue reading “Side by Side: The Double and Enemy”

Prisoners

“Prisoners” floors you by depicting the unclear nature of evil.

There’s a woman in Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” who lost her son 26 years prior to this film’s events. She shows Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) the one tape she watches of her missing son each morning and dejectedly declares, “No one took him. Nothing happened. He’s just gone.”

Detective thrillers and crime procedurals have conditioned us into always expecting an answer and motivation behind the terrible things that happen in the world. We’re left unsatisfied when we don’t get the answer we were looking for, if the puzzle pieces don’t paint a complete portrait or if the ending isn’t nice and tidy.

Rarely in life is this ever the case, and like David Fincher’s cryptic “Zodiac,” “Prisoners” attains intense thrills and gravitas through scattered clues that seem to be everywhere and answers that are nowhere. It’s a studio film that minimizes on the action set pieces, the family melodrama and the pretentious psychology to show that evil is not only omnipresent, but it’s the real mystery.

The two young daughters of the Dover family and the Birch family go missing much like that first boy 26 years earlier; they just disappear. On Thanksgiving Day the two girls go across the street, we get a close-up of a barren tree outside their suburban home, and they’re gone.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) suspects the timid loner Alex Jones (Paul Dano) swiped his daughter. With flat, stringy hair, thick glasses belonging to another decade and a junker RV, he certainly fits the description, but when Detective Loki is brought in to interrogate, Alex is clean and seems incapable of anything so sinister. When Alex is let go without charge, Keller intervenes and abducts Alex himself, demanding the answer he knows must be there.   Continue reading “Prisoners”

Incendies

Denis Villeneuve’s powerhouse Greek tragedy drama was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

“Incendies” is an emotional powerhouse of a drama drawing from real world headlines, Hollywood epics and Greek tragedy. This French Canadian soul-wrencher is a deep, far reaching film of many characters and complexities. But for all its ability to shock and floor you with painful realizations, it is never anything but engaging and riveting to watch.

It begins with the twins. Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) Marwan have just been read their mother Nawal’s (Lubna Azabel) will. “Bury me naked, face down, away from the world with no stone. No epitaph for broken promises.” Her broken promise was not revealing her full past to either of her kids, one who loved but never fully understood her and the other who gave up on her odd behavior long ago.

In death, she gives them two envelopes, one to be delivered to the father they never met and the other to the brother they didn’t know existed. Jeanne travels to Nawal’s homeland in the Middle East to track both down, and as she does, the movie intercuts her journey with Nawal’s own journey and torturous history. Continue reading “Incendies”