Sicario (2015) — I: Law
*SPOILERS*
Wrapping up this mini-series on Villeneuve’s post-hiatus, pre-Sci Fi films by looking at Sicario now with a focus on the protagonist’s arc and the meta conversation that her interactions with other characters represent. This movie’s a hard 9/soft 10. If you disagree feel free to give me your bum ass reasoning right before you fondle my balls 🖕🏽🖕🏽
Villeneuve has a unifying narrative approach that threads most of his post-hiatus films, and certainly applies to Sicario, brutal in its illustration of humanity and uncompromising in its presentation of truth. Written by Taylor Sheridan and visualized by Roger Deakins, with stellar performances all around, this is peak film. A Neo-Western about the interface between pawns in the American war on drugs and the power structures that manage it, this story reveals its characters through their decisions.
Justice and Other Illusions
Sicario follows Kate Mercer, who joined the FBI and very quickly started working in the field, “She’s a thumper.” We find her only 5 operations in on the gritty and ugly frontlines of the war on drugs.
Her worldview is one in which official and true are equatable — black and white. She’s an idealist.
- When the home they are raiding ends up being a message of mockery from Mexican cartels to US law enforcement with a booby trap that kills many FBI agents, Kate is asked what they should tell the press. “The truth,” she responds. To her there is the truth and then everything else.
- We also see her struggle with the extra-legal nature of the operation to retrieve Guillermo outside of U.S. jurisdiction; we see her struggle with shooting a Mexican federal officer acting as a cartel agent at the border while surrounded by civilians. To her there is the law and then everything else.
- We see her fail to appreciate the strategic need to forgo prosecuting Manuel Diaz for wire fraud; and subsequently we see her fail to anticipate the cartel mole sent to extract information from her. To her there is protocol and then everything else.
- We also see her fail to appreciate Alejandro’s incentives for involvement in their operation, thinking he is merely the enemy of the enemy. To her there are the lines that separate categories and the blocks in-between.
We also see her as someone unable to move on from a divorce, as the story gradually reveals she wears granny panties on the assumption that no one else sees them, only seems to have a single platonic friend in Reggie who’s also in her fire squad, and had to give up cigarettes probably due to overdoing it following her divorce (interesting character note: FBI fieldwork did not cause her to start smoking again). Thus we are left with the picture of a woman whose demanding devotion to public work serves either as the thing that caused her relationship to fail in the first place and/or an escape in the wake of a failed/failing relationship. She’s stuck in the past, which figures into the rigidity of her binary worldview. This matters later.
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Sicario Essay —
I: Law
