In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, no one comes out clean
On freedom, surveillance and the moral wasteland that is the grey areas of the world
There’s a lot more grey area covering the maps of the world, and the maps of of our moral, government, personal, and historical landscape than we care to think about sometimes. It’s never neat, often ugly and confusing. It gives a strong whiff of a tarnished metallic finish, and an uncomfortable presence seeping into the bones we feel so very intimately. There are some who, understandably, can’t afford to delve into these zones. Others who refused to believe the world is anything beyond black and white whatever of the myriad of perspectives they fall on. Others step to the edge of that moral no man’s land but are unable to go any further. It is not a nice place, nor is it often the absolute that one should align with. It’s a place that can cause a person to become a cypher or conduit instead of a reasoning human being.
And then there others who fully understand it. Others that wholeheartedly embrace that the world is nothing but this intensely complex system that is how the world really functions behind the curtain. People like CIA agent Matt Graver, who positively revels in it’s paradoxical certainty. Though he too is lost amid the reeds, his focus still only on his view and not the other influences at play, or at the mercy of his trigger finger. You could say it revels in amoral machismo but that would be nearsighted. It’s more that kind of element is a product of how the movie view the system, how the system functions. It’s almost apathetic to labels in that respect.
In Sicario, Emily Blunt’s FBI agent, Kate Macer valiantly attempts to hold on to whatever moral upstanding surety she can in the face of ever mounting conflict. Her way of doing things clashes with their way because their way is the one that keeps the machine running. She’s a bug in the system. Reduced to a sideline role, her life is a give or take. The individual reduced to observer in front of the mechanism of the system. It’s not right yet….the circular logic almost makes it sensible for such systems to be in place. They are required because of what was initiated. A snake constantly eating its tail. It’s needed because it was built to be needed. Kate believes what she’s doing is good, that it’s progress. She is trying to make the world a safer place. But against Matt and Alejandro all they’re really intent on doing is move the ball around a circular field.
The way things work doesn’t mean they’re set in stone. Macer attempts to remain on as much solid moral ground as she can find. But it gradually dwindles away, as does her agency and influence to invoke any kind of change. It isn’t what she signed up for. The final scene in her apartment shows just how far removed and helpless she really is. The fact that she’s such an assured, stoic, almost robotically upstanding presence from the outset makes it hurt even more in those final moments. There’s two options for her, both involve something dying. She chooses to kill her morality by signing the papers to keep quiet, instead of losing her life, and remaining forever silent anyway.
Where Sicario was stringently taut; pulsing with a rhythmic efficiency that offered a powerful and resonant story, Soldado enters with hammers being shot out of cannons. On the precipice of chaos. No rules. It’s not about the futile attempts to change things, but diving into the darkness without a light to bring with us. The thing is, a lot the film seems lost in the darkness, caught without much an emotional throughline until roughly halfway through the film. It’s wonderfully stylish and abstractly compelling but in a way that feels detached instead of a desire for the audience to invest in it. Yes, the way a government runs in the shadows is… compromising to say the least. Is there good and bad? Depends on what side of the border you’re standing on, right? In a way, it’s brave in keeping itself on the figurative fence. The political issues and current landscape of the American system makes the film relevant and affecting , offering multiple perspectives that attempts to be both apolitical, zoom-in on the real people dealing with it, and also how it’s not just one side, or one thing that has brought the country and the people to this point.
Graver is tasked with starting a war with the Mexican cartels, by first assassinating a lawyer of one cartel, and then framing the kidnapping of a another head of a cartel in retaliation for the assassination. For that he brings back Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) who’s like a walking demonic apparition here. Naturally, things don’t exactly go as planned; while an American teenager living on the border is initiated into the world of trafficking people across the border. Of course these two threads will collide. This pairing of stories — one that tracks the operatives, one that tracks the people eventually caught in the crossfire — is the same as what Sicario did. In an engaging and effective bit of in-film switching, Alejandro emerges as a kind of backup moral center. Del Toro’s work here is less like a wolf in its prime waiting to pounce, but more like a bear being turned loose. That he is ultimately considered expendable allows for the film to gravitate toward his plight — and that of the young girl he’s hellbent on getting to some kind of safety when he realises he’s compromised on all sides — in a surprisingly paternal and gentle way. It may not be as effortless but it certainly provides a human consequence when things go pear-shaped. That at the end of the day, it’s not simply a statistic but a person.
The first part of the film is boldly obtuse and jarring. A thread of surveillance permeates every facet of the story. And that’s one of the major themes that run through both Soldado and Sicario, though in a way that’s more subtle at first glance. Everything is run through it. Everyone is being watched. Everything can be tracked. We are not so alone as we think we are. Off the grid seems to be only an illusion, and no matter how powerful or well protected one may seem, they can always get got.
The thing with surveillance is that it’s put to such galling…matter-of-fact use here. The flexing of intelligence and military muscle throws up so many questions that film doesn’t bother to answer. And as well it doesn’t since it would only further cloud the narrative function and leave us with a haze of perspectives that attempted to have knots tied up around them, instead of leaving it open for interpretation (or disgust as I’m sure some people would feel in watching it). Freedom isn’t exactly an illusion, but it does come with some conditions. Absolute freedom is seen as an obvious lie, but the boundary where the conditions emerge still remains this shifting, nebulous thing, and Soldado exploits it to construct an entry that may not be well rounded and subversive as the original, but still a beast that has something to show about this whole blasted climate we find ourselves in. It may not be nice to know, but we can’t act like it’s an either/or supposition. The age of binary absolutes has long been pushed off the cliff into the sea of oblivion.
The deeper the film descends, the more the webs of each thread are let loose, the more muddled and messy it gets. It’s as if the filmis trying to show that even a story that’s constructed with intention and control, is ultimately at the mercy of the issue or topic it’s attempting to tell a story about. Soldado has reflective moments of importance but it’s unrelentingly bleak and not exactly one that invites sympathy to any of the parties involved, even the kids who land on opposite sides of this — and that’s saying something.
