That One Scene in Sicario

“There she is. The beast. Juárez.” That’s what DEA Steve Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) says in “Sicario” (2015) as his black SUV caravan, armed to the hilt, snakes its way across the Mexican border to grab hold of an important so & so and then drag him back to El Paso. Forsing doesn’t really need to say it, of course, except for expository purposes, but then, he is also trying to scare the wits out of newbie Kate Macy (Emily Blunt) sitting in the SUV backseat. He does. He scares the wits out of us too. Of course, by the time we get to this point, we really have no wits left to scare.

If there is a better single cinematic sequence in the twenty-tens than this one, I have yet to see it. I guess you could call it an action sequence, though the gunplay is mostly just limited to the end, and is rapid-fire fast, less about thrills than the surgical precision of those doing the shooting and the damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t fatalism of those who get shot. But really, it’s a sequence in which mood is paramount, and that mood is dread. You feel this dread for a lot of reasons. You feel it in the way director Denis Villeneuve tilts the camera from the submachine gun being cradled by Benicio del Toro’s engimatic Alejandro to the eyes of Kate. You feel it because of Kate’s eyes, which are the bellwether throughout this scene (and the movie), and so you feel it from the way Villeneuve and his editor Joe Walker keep returning to her eyes at crucial moments. And you also feel it because of the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

His music for the scene first appears in the scene’s couple quick triggers. First, after Kate has painfully, reluctantly agreed to go along on this heavily armed jaunt into Juárez, her character is left standing alone, at which point Jóhannsson’s first indelible, per the more expert language of Thomas Goss, “downward-glissandoing low strings from C to A”, evoking the sensation of your stomach dropping, like you really are being pulled down, down into the belly of the beast.

Jóhannsson repeats this downward movement as Alejandro removes and folds up his suit jacket, like a boxer disrobing to go meet his opponent in center ring, making it clear trouble is on the horizon.

Jóhannsson keeps that downward movement going over a series of aerial shot drifting over the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Lord, we’re on our way now, on a roller-coaster called The Beast in those terrifying instants when it’s making its slow climb up the first hill before you plummet.

And as those aerial shots continue, Jóhannsson both intensifies those downward movements while adding a kind of crunching percussion, growing louder and louder until it becomes so cacophonous that it seems to become indistinguishable from the whirring blades of a black helicopter overlooking the scene and vice-versa. And it’s the kind of moment you re-visit after seeing it for the first time and realize that not only was the dread raised to a level where you can hardly stand it so much that you feel like just giving up and crashing through a window like a glued-up Steve McCroskey, but that the dread was raised to such a level without, really, anything dramatic even happening. That? That’s the magic of the movies.

Jóhann Jóhannsson died on Friday. He was 48.

The Many Faces of Sicario's Emily Blunt

 Confusion

 Curiosity

 Concern

Fear 

Bemused

 Exhausted

 "For the love of GOD..."

 Unwilling / Willing

 

Merle Haggard Song

 Reverse Poignant Look Yourself In The Mirror Shot

 Discovery

 Actualization

Surrender

A Few More 2015 Shots I Loved

I always write a lengthy diatribe about my favorite movie shot of the year (see: yesterday & the day before) but once again I have gone one further by paying homage to (ripping off) my friend Ryan McNeil at The Matinee who annually puts up a hella awesome post in which he submits a few of his favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary. So here are a few of my favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary.

Sicario

As “Sicario” opens, a low rumble pervades the soundtrack, like thunder percolating in the distance. The picture comes up on the Arizonan desert as members of a SWAT Team dart in from screen’s right, a nondescript house their target. That low rumble grows, threatening, menacing and then... It explodes. An ARV smashes through the house’s wall. Shooting erupts. Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), commander of a high-tech top-notch kidnap unit responding to a call, kills someone. But what they find isn’t what they expected. Dead bodies, rows of them, victims of a drug cartel’s vengeance, rot inside the home’s drywall. These thick-skinned agents bend over and vomit. And it gets worse when someone opens a trap door, detonating a bomb, taking a few of the good guys with it. Lucky to survive, Kate sits in the post-blast dust, dazed, and sees a severed arm on the ground. This is American soil but it’s like the opening of “Saving Private Ryan.” The War on Drugs is a nifty label; you can use it in stump speeches; you can put it on bumper stickers; you can say we’re “winning” it or “losing” it or anything in-between. But it’s all distant ambient noise compared to the high-watt screams of this sequence. This, “Sicario” is saying with a punch to the goddam gut, is your War on Drugs.

Working in conjunction with Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, one that favors keen subtext over explicit speechifying, Denis Villeneuve’s immaculate two hour film feels extraordinarily lean, packaged with nary a moment of dead air. His action set pieces are unfathomably intense, yet no less exhilarating for the way in which he genuinely, inexorably and breathlessly builds tension; he builds and builds and then…releases, quickly and viciously, maximizing the impact before barreling on. And if these and other events are brutal, he never glorifies the violence, giving us just enough sense of the carnage to grasp the enormous real world stakes and then cutting away. And “Sicario’s” photography, courtesy of the impeccable Roger Deakins, repeatedly ruminates in breathless images of the southwestern landscape, such as the red sun cutting through the low hanging clouds like arrows of flaming fire even as machine gun fire pops in the distance, nature’s beauty juxtaposed against the film’s ferocious anger.

Kate is our entry point this story of extravagant governmental murk and mire, enlisted to join a nebulous outfit captained by a guy whose position is vague but clearly high up, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, effortlessly rendering drug enforcement as dinner theater), introduced wearing flip-flops to a top level meeting, swift characterization that establishes his easygoing familiarity with such weighty derring-do that stands in stark contrast to Kate’s naivety. Played by Blunt with taciturn intensity, Kate is something of a cipher, but that’s deliberate rather than a writing failure. Matt ensures she has no family ties because he wants her to be a social nonentity. The film’s only real pause in momentum is a seeming cut-from-cardboard sequence of Kate going out for drinks that devolves into something horrifying. The horror, however, while conventional on the surface, expresses an existence where every personal relationship retains the possibility of being compromised. To lead her life, you inevitably see the world upside down, evoked in an indelible shot reflected in a coffee table of Kate at a delicate instant.

Physically, Blunt’s performance is rock steady. Her eyes, on the other hand, searching, skeptical, fearful, tell a dissimilar story, one in which confusion merely balloons by the moment; she’s down the rabbit hole. Normally a movie so devoted to withholding pertinent information from its protagonist would be guilty of a cheap ploy to prolong suspense; in “Sicario” it feels spot-on. Cryptic is the language of bureaucracy in this brave new world. Matt speaks in vacuous riddles. You keep waiting for Kate to transform into a fed-up ass-kicker taking names, the requisite unstoppable anti-drug action movie force. That doesn’t happen. The only real knowledge she gleans is the war’s continually moving boundaries. Anything goes.

Those moving goalposts pertain just as much to the movie’s narrative. If Matt seems the big cheese, that is proven partially illusory the more Kate gets to know his ostensible right-hand man, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). His intent, his attitude, even his nationality, shift scene to scene, and that elusiveness is personified most in his relationship with Kate, one that persistently re-sets. If you think they’re friends, they’re probably enemies, and vice-versa. Fifteen years ago Del Toro won an Oscar for “Traffic” playing a Mexican cop, Javier, caught up in the War on Drugs on the other side of the border. Alejandro may as well be Javier with a lot more mileage on him. If Javier was hopeful, Alejandro, played by Del Toro with a fiercely inscrutable poker face, is dark and doubtful, and the lines in his face unconsciously evoke the toil this border battle takes.

The “Traffic” comparison is imperative. Steven Soderbergh’s fine film encompassed all aspects of this unwinnable war, from corrupt Mexican cops to DEA agents stuck between a rock and a hard place to the drug war coming home to affluent America. “Sicario” deliberately takes a narrower approach, presenting the front lines rather than the fallout, money poured into the logistics and gear to maintain a fight where the finish line is an omnipresent mirage. One scene finds Kate descending into a drug tunnel beneath the border where yet another harsh revelation awaits. Emblemizing the entire film, she is made to burrow deeper and deeper, hoping to reach the bottom of this crusade, only to find the bottom repeatedly giving way to more layers, more and more, on and on into forever, etc. It's a cynical viewpoint, yes, but from that cynicism emerges a paradoxical clarity, the only kind that can exist in a conflict of such awe-inspiring ethical elasticity. The further she plunges into darkness, the closer she gets to seeing the light.