REVIEW: Sicario (2015)

In the heyday of the political thriller, which we will put as the 1970s for American cinema, ambiguities were often less moral in nature and more in terms of the extent of the problem. The Conversation, a masterpiece by the way, is ambiguous as to the exact nature and motivations of the forces ranged against poor old Harry Caul, but the film itself is less ambiguous about what it thinks of the culture of surveillance. We see the same questions of the nature of the crime and the criminals in The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Those murky days were, ironically, a simpler time – the enemy was hidden and seemingly omnipotent, but they were not us. The films are never in doubt about what they felt were wrong with the world. Nowadays, however, this division is less clear, as are the films. Sicario sinks under some of the same issues that made something like Zero Dark Thirty such a hateful film.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an FBI agent recruited into a secret task force which aims to take down the leader of a Mexican cartel. Under Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), Kate is told to watch and learn. However, Matt and Alejandro may have other reasons for wanting Kate around, and they may not be trusted.

Sicario is a thriller about Mexican drug cartels, the American’s complicity in both the crimes and the general demand which funds and fuels the cartels, the moral ambiguities in policing across borders and outside the rules. It is a great-looking film, brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins, tightly directed by Denis Villeneuve and scored by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It moves at a good pace, which keeps it serious and largely engaging throughout (apart from a seriously poor coloured rubber band plot contrivance), a dense and complex plot that keeps you interested and some tough performances. It is effective, slightly shrill entertainment, with some fantastic, tense set pieces that largely hold the film together. As such, it is a very well made and watchable film. But…

Most political thrillers have a problem striking a decent balance between the complexity of their politic commentary and entertainment value. Sicario is dark and complex, even uncompromising, plot-wise, but it is hopelessly shallow in other ways. Its representation of Mexico is downright insulting – American agents casually climb to the roof of their compound on the Mexican border and watch gunfights and explosions in Mexico with binoculars. We do see short sequences detailing small aspects of American corruption (a few scenes) and complicity (one line), but we get a lot more focus on Americans getting the job done, state murder compared to finding a vaccine and talk of the ends justifying the means. Using Kate Macer as an audience surrogate, finding out as we do how the Mexican drug war ‘really’ works, the film makes its own world view clear. But since this is primarily a thriller, this world view is hopelessly inadequate to any real and true understanding of the problem and strongly stacks the deck to favour of the Americans as emotional identifiers for the audience. We are always standing on the American side of the border, looking at the Mexican drug war through the eyes of Americans. The film offers then a severe view of Mexico and a queasily ambiguous view of the Americans’ collusion with criminals and their willingness to break the rules. Where a fairer and more complex film might want to question this very American idea of the ends justifying the means, Sicario prefers to avoid this issue.

Sicario is a very well made film, but it remarkably shallow in terms of what it depicts. It is hard to work out what the film wants you to think of the Americans’ use of torture and their collusion with criminals who slaughter whole families. It represents this world as murky, dense and confusing, but does not dare offer an opinion, happy presumably that it is largely across the border and not here – a presumption that is self-serving and certainly not good enough. Where it should confront and shock but stand above the nastiness shown onscreen, Sicario instead remains mired in the same ambiguities as the film’s American characters. But when these ambiguities involve assassination and torture, that’s an uncomfortable place for a film of any sort to be.

REVIEW: Enemy (2015)

Enemy is a film that is not bothered about the ‘anxiety of influence.’ Director Villeneuve and writer Gullón display such a fondness for other films that it is difficult not to feel it rubbing off. Before the film is even ten minutes in, we are solidly in the world of both Cronenberg and Lynch. The rest of the film is a puzzle that is left for you to decipher at your own leisure.

Adam is a history lecturer, who teaches about the controls of dictatorship and yet lives a fairly bare existence himself, rotating between teaching, commuting and having joyless sex with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). Having rented and watched a film that a colleague has recommended, Adam suddenly jerks awake, convinced that he has seen his double in a bit part actor in the film. He becomes obsessed with finding this person, a search which sparks, to say the least, an identity crisis.

Enemy feels like a film from that brief period of time after Donnie Darko that saw a surfeit in similar puzzle films, from The Machinist to Primer. Largely eschewing traditional plotting and characterisation in favour of plotting, some of these films were maddening and some were quite good fun – Primer was particularly enjoyable. Enemy is instead all about the mood. It is a grim, greens-and-yellows detective story that withholds enough to make a puzzle out of itself without ever distracting from its overall vaguely Hitchcockian tone. There are several interpretations about what the whole thing is about (and a good few of them sound rather silly), but the real value of the film is that it gets an edgy, searching, eerie feel without ever having to sacrifice it to some series of revelations and a villain to be beaten. It is a film about asking questions, not one about finding answers, and it is all the more interesting for that. It is told with an invention and élan, which keeps you interested, even if the film’s examinations of identity, uniqueness and fidelity appear to boil down to an episode of Wife Swap.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a great performance, playing two characters with slight differences. Most of the eeriness of the film comes from the fact that Adam and Anthony are so similar in small ways, as opposed to total opposites who usually encounter each other in films of this sort. Gyllenhaal then is tasked with playing two different characters who have to be both different and the same. He pulls it off well. Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon have less to do (these kinds of films all too often favour men), but turn in convincing performances as women watching the men (or man) in their live falling apart.

In summary, good, unsettling fun – up until the ending, which is, unfortunately, a touch too smugly odd. This complexity, more stylistic than anything, will be disappointingly missing from Villeneuve’s other 2015 release, Sicario.

REVIEW: Incendies (2011)

  Incendies is a film by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, losing out to Susanne Bier’s In A Better World. Set in and around the Israeli conflict, the film, not unlike Samuel Maoz’s fantastic Lebanon, considers the human effects of the conflict over the conflict itself.

  The story follows two siblings (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) as they journey to the Lebanon to uncover their dead mother’s (Lubna Azabal) past. She has left them two letters, one for their father and another for their brother, whom they did not know existed. As they try to deliver these letters, the film intercuts between them and their mother’s life as she moves from country girl to assassin to political prisoner.

  The film is set in the midst of political upheaval and frequent violence. With its slow pace and its preoccupation with females in war-torn landscapes, a sense of lose is most prevalent. Violence is sporadic and filmed with an eye for realism rather than the exploitation of clearly engineered set-piece filmmaking. Trauma and memory are the film’s themes and it deals with them with a lot of respect. Intriguingly, the film does not specify the location it is set in, giving the film an apolitical stance. It carefully avoids a bias in any direction, preferring instead to remain a deeply personal work. As well as this, the film is relatively slight in sentimentality for the majority of its running time. As for the performances, Lubna Azabal powerfully portrays a woman lost in the conflict and unsure of where she stands. Désormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette have the more thankless roles but are well equipped to make their characters much more than just mere ciphers.

  One of the films more odd features is its refusal to be just another wartime melodrama. From its unspecified space and the rather out-of-place though strangely effective Radiohead music video sequences, the film tries to dodge categorization and the stagnancy of similar Oscar dramas. These touches do not always work but they are an interesting feature in the film.

  Unfortunately, the film comes to increasingly resemble a trashy melodrama with plot twists that change everything that as gone before. These twists are hopelessly contrived, though admittedly possible given the situation, and hamper the carefully low-key and human drama that has come before. They feel like a major third-act diversion, in which the film drops its themes and preoccupations for the sake of an emotional peak at the close. The film never really recovers and it is a real pity, downgrading the work to a ‘good’ film when it should have been ‘great.’

  Though the film never recovers from its lapse into ‘TV Movie of the Week’ histrionics, it remains an interesting film in which the destruction wrecked on the landscape mirrors the destruction done to the inner landscapes of the characters. A sensitive work that never feels exploitative of its situation or characters, it engenders a feeling of good faith that sees it through its less successful moments.