Fear and Loathing in Juarez
Sicario / directed by Denis Villeneuve
I had high hopes for Sicario: I’d heard rumors of crushing tension, bleak moral calculi, gripping action. After watching it, I can say that these elements are all there in aspirational form; but much like the American war on drugs war it purports to depict, Sicario is a enterprise doomed by its own overweening hubris. Straining to achieve high tension and brooding menace via a spare and clinical style, the effect is undone by cross-currents of implausibility and melodrama. On the level of substance, the cross-pollination it posits between the war on drugs and the war on terror ends up failing to capture the particular horror of either quixotic crusade. Though the film purports to offer a peek behind the curtain of the reality of American power and rampant militarism, it feels strangely vague and unmoored from our actual world.
Following a raid on a drug house in which two agents are killed by a hidden bomb, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited by a mysterious government operative, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), to join a mysterious task force on a mysterious mission. Did I mention that the whole thing is cloaked in an air of mystery? Macer’s not naive, but it’s obvious from the start that she’s overmatched by the levels of skullduggery and nefarious purpose that swirl around her new crowd like dark wisps from a crack pipe. Their first operation turns out to be a high-speed SUV caravan trip from El Paso to Juarez and back again (incidentally, this was an alternate title to The Hobbit considered but finally, wisely, rejected by J.R.R. Tolkien) to extradite a high-ranking drug gang operative back to the U.S. Just as the bomb in the initial raid signaled a clear tie in to the war on terror and the tactics of Middle Eastern conflict, Juarez appears as a city of Baghdad-level fortification and civic desuetude. In some of the many, many high-altitude tracking shots that punctuate the film like helium balloons at some rich kid’s party, we see the tight-packed Escalades skirt through the border checkpoints and down the streets of the city; close-in views have us zooming along with the yanquis and their Mexican police escorts.
Kate's companions, who by this point include a reserved and yes, mysterious, Latin gentleman named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), exchange manly words about looking out for snipers on rooftops and suspicious cars, and also to note that if they’re going to be attacked, it will be when they’re heading back over the border. It is a sequence clearly intended to be a tour de force of tension and delayed action, yet this build-up comes unraveled when they speed back northwards only to founder to a stop in backed-up traffic - the very stopped traffic they’d seen as they sped southward into Juarez. Uh, yeah, of course the baddies are going to hit them now, when they’re sitting ducks! A one-sided shoot-out ensues, the extraditers getting the jump on the gangsters (who give themselves away by looking like gangsters) and slaughtering them in a fusillade of Made-in-the-USA bullets. The others drivers and passengers on the bridge appear strangely unfazed, as if this is something that happens everyday -- though Kate’s outrage afterwards makes it clear that this was an unprecedented international-incident level sort of event.
Yet Kate’s concerns are brushed off - her new crew is all about stirring the hornet’s nest, sending a message, going big, and their plan is to get the cartel’s head of U.S. operations to go home so they can track him to the head honcho. Unknown to Kate, they torture the operative they’ve captured - turns out Alejandro’s a real pro at this sort of thing - and somewhere around this point it’s made clear that Kate’s been included on the task force merely to add a patina of legality to their machinations.
So Sicario at one level is a story about the war on drugs being conducted like the war on terror. And with its shots of vast U.S. military bases lined with combat aircraft and unadorned interior spaces occupied by men conducting torture or plotting war, Sicario unfurls a behind-the-curtain view of American power within the U.S. itself. But there is a curious case of displacement occurring here. We are asked to be dismayed by a fictional account of something that has actually already happened in the real world in the war on terror; at the same time, we are asked to take its depictions of an escalated drug war as somehow worse than what has already happened in reality. This second point simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The war on drugs has resulted in the imprisonment of literally millions of Americans, mostly for non-violent offenses, a tactic that falls disproportionately on minorities and the poor, plus billions upon billions of dollars squandered. This is to say nothing of the lives lost on both sides of the border as the war has failed to actually do the most important thing - keeping people from getting hooked on drugs in the first place, and helping addicts get off. Sicario may be saying that things can always get worse, with which I unfortunately cannot disagree. But generally speaking, it asks us to be upset by a fictional situation that arguably pales in comparison to the reality of what has happened in the actual world; we are asked to be both ignorant and naive in order for the film to be effective.
Sicario’s frequent overhead shots - of border landscapes, paramilitary warriors approaching a target, or the aforementioned Escalade enfilade - as well as panoramic views of dwarfing skies and military installations, work towards an otherwordly and detached view of events, as does an eerie, often-industrial sounding soundtrack. But the actual events of the film fail to match to the ominousness being pumped up around them. Macer’s involvement in the extralegal task force ultimately feels forced and superfluous; the fact that she’s the only woman likewise feels overdone, the gendered nature of the immoral men/moral woman dyad a little too pat. And the character of Del Toro’s Alejandro and the role he plays in the dark maneuvers afoot comes to rest somewhere near the intersection of improbable and cockamamie - rarely a good place to rest the fulcrum of your story, particularly one so strongly striving for sobriety and meaningfulness as Sicario.