There is little doubt Denis Villeneuve is one of the most exciting talents to emerge from the current crop of Quebecois filmmakers. His stunning Incendies about the dark secret haunting a Canadian family of Middle Eastern origins played like a taut psychological thriller anchored to the heart of that regions conflict. Two years ago his Prisoners was anguished mystery and featured Hugh Jackman as the desperate father of a kidnapped child squaring off with Jake Gyllenhall’s police detective in a race against time. His Cannes offering this year is Sicario, set on the front-lines of the drug wars. “Cartel movies” are, by now, their own genre, and one in which many top directors have worked with films such as Traffic (Steven Soderbergh), Savages (Oliver Stone), Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) and The Counselor (Ridley Scott). As the drug wars have escalated, claiming tens of thousands of victims south of the border and threatening to drag Mexico into chaos, Mexican drug lords have loomed large in Hollywood films as the new face of evil incarnate in movies and TV series (such as FX’s The Bridge). So it is in Sicario, which opens with a heart-thumping raid on a suspected drug house in the Arizona suburbs which uncovers a mass grave (a similar “death house” was featured in another film on Cartel violence: David Ayer’s End of Watch).
This is where we meet Kate, an ethical and overworked FBI agent that wants to stem the cross border drug tide. She soon is attached by her superiors to an interagency task force with broad powers to take the fight to the cartels and is led by “Matt” (Josh Brolin), a mysterious agent who claims to work for the Department of Defense and shows up to meetings in flip flops. It’s not a big surprise his operations are not really going to be by the book. By the time the team, which includes an even shadier self-proclaimed ex-prosecutor from Mexico (Benicio del Toro), flies south in a private jet we (and Kate) have pretty much gotten the idea. A drive through Ciudad Suarez has cadavers dangling from overpasses like in Falluja. The retrieval of a cartel boss and his return to the U.S. features a border crossing shootout filmed with the clinical precision of a top-form Michael Mann. Filmed through the lens of Villeneuve (and DP extraordinaire Roger Deakins who photographed the film), Mexico is a hellish nightmare. By the time the story takes us into a remote desert smuggling tunnel we are practically in the lower rungs of Dante’s inferno – and Villeneuve intends to give us the full tour. In a moment when the war on drugs is re-evaluated stateside and questioned in Mexico, Villeuneve puts in front and center with a full-on genre film that in part is, as he told us at the Palais des Festivals, a “political” movie and a “film about America”. It certainly seems like it when Brolin’s Black Op honcho explains wistfully that the days of the Colombian cartel had a semblance of order compared to present-day mayhem. “We could control them then. Now there is chaos”. He may as well have been taking about Lybia, Iraq or Syria as the film makes clear with scenes of Special Forces briefings that recall those in Zero Dark Thirty. The larger point here is about the moral ambiguities of modern conflicts, the “sea of gray between black and white”, as Villeneuve put it. In the midst of all the testosterone – just like Jessica Chastain was in Zero Dark – is Emily Blunt’s Kate, a by-the-book agent utterly frustrated with the futility of her efforts to contain cartel operations from spilling into her Phoenix sector. Critics were mostly complimentary here, comparing her character to Jodie Foster’s Cherize in Silence of the Lambs, a more than generous comparison given that Kate is never really given an opportunity to make an impact on the events that surround her, spending most of the film demanding explanations in exasperation from officials that stonewall her. Josh Brolin and Del Toro, on the other hand, add memorable characters to the genre canon. Brolin, taking his cue from the ruthless Black Ops cowboys that are the George Pattons of these new secret and dirty wars. For his part Benicio del Toro is nothing if not a Cartel genre regular. He bemusedly ran through all the permutations of his “drug movie work: the addict, the dealer, the addict-dealer, the boss, the killer…”. This, however, may be his best. A composite, brooding man who exudes a dark back-story and emanates menace as well as a startling humanity. A package that is destined to remain in the annals of cartel films. Villeneuve’s incisive and forceful direction benefits from driving score by Golden Globe winning Jóhan Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything) which creates an ominous soundscape that is a perfect complement to Roger Deakins’ images.
Luca Celada