Sicario

SICARIO                               B+      

USA  (121 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Denis Villeneuve             Official Facebook

In the manner of Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (2011), Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013), Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has made a Hollywood action thriller that brings the audience directly into the Mexican drug wars, giving them a front row seat exposing the nefarious practices taking place by our own government in the name of stamping out criminal activities.  While the title of the film is Mexican slang for the word “hitman,” the film paints a dark picture into the skewed moral lines that exist in combatting drug wars, where it’s often hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, as both are operating in the same toxic cesspool of greed, corruption, murder, and power, as all sides are vying to control the $19 to $29 billion dollars that the Mexican drug cartels receive annually from U.S. drug sales.  While this is essentially a high powered, adrenaline-laced film from start to finish, we are drawn into the action in a riveting opening, seen through the eyes of Kate Macy (Emily Blunt), an overly conscientious FBI agent specializing in kidnapping cases leading a SWAT team to an Arizona border town home where they believe people are being hidden.  In the process of discovering 40 dead bodies stored vertically in the walls wrapped in plastic body bogs, a planted explosive device wipes out part of the team.  After this harrowing experience, Kate is called into a meeting where a special task force of elite agents is considering their next move, where she is told the house is owned by a local cartel boss Manuel Diaz (Bernardo P. Saracino) before being asked to volunteer as an operative on special assignment headed by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) in the Defense Department, even though she has no real drug enforcement experience.  Their goal is to track down the head of a notorious drug cartel, Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cesar Cedillo), kidnapping one of Diaz’s chief operatives named Guillermo (Edgar Arreola) in an attempt to flush Fausto out of hiding.  While purportedly flying to El Paso, Texas, their real destination is Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where an entirely different set of rules operate, as this has been the site of a long and bloody battleground over contested gang turf.  Mexican drug cartels control 90% of the cocaine entering the United States, where the Ciudad Juárez cartel had control over prime drug trafficking routes, but they have been under attack from the more powerful Sinaloa Cartel, headed by the recently escaped most-wanted prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whose estimated net worth is in the billions, infiltrating the police, government and the military, where they are the largest known mafia organization in the world.  Stepping into the middle of this dispute is like walking through the gates of Hell, as over 140,000 people have been killed in the Mexican drug wars since 2006, with nearly 30,000 people still missing.  Because it happens on the other side of the border, it may as well be invisible to most Americans, but life in Mexico can be a traumatizing experience. 

The director uses a blisteringly intense, cinéma vérité style to express just how brutally violent the world in Mexico has become, including the sight of hacked-off remains of dead bodies hanging from a bridge while Kate rides in a caravan of giant SUV’s and machine-gun implanted vans driving through the city streets of Juárez past astonished bystanders, where a firefight may erupt at any second, as they are being tailed by other suspicious vehicles.  Despite this military presence, they are able to surprise Guillermo, literally kidnapping him from his home, then making a mad dash to the border where traffic is backed up due to a car breakdown up ahead, leaving cars in a standstill.  In this tense atmosphere, despite the wall-to-wall presence of civilians, their team must identify would-be assassins in the vicinity and strike before being struck, turning into a bloodbath taking place in a sea of innocent bystanders.  Horrified by what she witnesses, they are quickly whisked away to safety carrying their prisoner in tow to the security of a nearby army facility.  Graver and his all-male team leave Kate out of the information trail, where part of the intentional thrust of the film is that it happens so fast and in such a confusing manner that it’s hard to follow just what’s taking place, where Kate’s mind is stunned by a flurry of improvisational fast action, where her confusion is translated to the audience.  It’s here that she meets Benicio del Toro as Alejandro, a native Colombian and former Mexican prosecutor whose presence is shrouded in mystery, though his physical hand shakes with the appearance of a man who has survived torture.  Appropriately, he is the man who interrogates Guillermo, bringing in a giant water jug, where in pure Hitchcockian fashion the camera focuses upon a drain on the floor, suggesting either waterboarding and/or an outlet for the stream of blood.  Torture is alive and well in the drug wars, where the film provides a searing realism that matches Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), especially the back alleys of seedy, gang-infested Mexican neighborhoods where danger lurks around every corner.  Into this swath of unending violence, another smaller story is being told, representing the average Mexican family, where a young Mexican kid is always waiting for his perpetually oversleeping Dad (he’s a cop that works nights) to take him to play soccer, where all he’s really asking for is a hint of normalcy.  This contrasts with the blurred reality of Kate, who is told by Alejandro that “Nothing will make sense to your American ears.  By the end, you will understand,” a clear stand-in for the American public that hasn’t a clue what’s going on, where part of the problem is seeing things exclusively through American eyes, which has a tendency to reveal only what they pick and choose while leaving out the rest.  This trip into Juárez is a surreal reminder of moral ambiguity, like the “heart of darkness” descent up river in Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), exposing America’s venture into Cambodia during the Vietnam era, a military excursion shrouded in secrecy taking place simultaneous to a President and Secretary of State repeatedly informing the American public and the world that Cambodia was strictly off limits. 

Kate is stunned by the expansion of American authority into Mexico, but receives word from her superiors that for this operation, the rules of engagement have expanded.  After learning the whereabouts of Diaz’s hideout from secret torture sessions, Graver’s team also rounds up Mexican migrants attempting to cross the border, checking for the presence of drug tunnels along the route, zeroing in on a specific location.  At the same time they freeze Diaz’s American bank accounts, where Kate thinks they have sufficient information to prosecute Diaz, but Graver isn’t interested, insisting it’s his boss they’re after.  By being left out of the specifics of each plan, where no one is what they appear to be, all carrying a hidden agenda, while Kate is simply going along for the ride, where the entire mission may have originally been intended to recruit her, but she’s the only one in the entire film that has any sense of a moral compass.  Everyone else is totally out of bounds, where they recognize her hesitation and how green she is immediately.  It’s not hard for her to realize she’s only in the operation because she’s working “within the law,” as a cover for their cowboy recklessness, somehow making it all legal.  While she has an opportunity to simply get out, an awkward moment where Alejandro actually has her back, literally saving her life, she feels compelled to find out where it all leads, as these guys are closer to the heads of the cartels than she’s ever been.  Using infra-red photography, a special ops night mission targets the American entrance of the tunnel, located in the middle of an endless desert expanse, where the look of the film recalls the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, both accentuating the military aspect of the raid where these guys mean business, specializing in getting in and out while completing their mission as quickly as possible.  While gunfire is heard in all directions, she gets separated from the team, exiting from one of the many tunnels where she sees something she’s not supposed to see, as it appears Alejandro is about to shoot an unarmed Mexican cop named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández, the father of the little kid) whose police car is filled to the gills with drugs and refers to Alejandro as “Medellín,” a hint as to his true connections.  The film belongs to del Toro by the end of the picture, where his sinister presence dominates the screen, crossing the line between both hero and villain, yet his intentions are lethal, reminiscent of Max von Sydow’s coolly precise assassin character in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), a man who operates outside all moral laws.  Whether this is all a CIA operation or not, one would think the war on drugs has failed, as America remains the largest consumer of the illegal products, so it’s perfectly conceivable that the U.S. government has no conceivable plan to stop the flow of drugs into this country, as the business is simply too lucrative.  While it’s treading on murky waters, what’s clear is the war on drugs has brought the cartel wars into our own country, where it’s not about stopping the flow of drugs but instead trying to control and/or influence the powers running the business operation.  It’s a chilling ending, where a fatherless kid makes his way to the soccer game, where the everpresent sound of gunfire can be heard from the surrounding neighborhoods, an everyday fact of life that will remain with him always.  The cinematography by Roger Deakins is stellar, while the dark musical score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson adds a pulsating presence of gloom. 

Prisoners

PRISONERS       C+         
USA  (153 mi)  2013  d:  Denis Villenueve                    Official site

Like Susan Bier, Lone Scherfig, Tom Tykwer, Nimrod Antal, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Guillermo del Toro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and the latest Nicholas Winding Refn effort before him, not to mention countless others, this is another example of a Hollywood flameout by a terrific foreign director, in this case a Canadian from Quebec making his first big budget Hollywood movie with a $50 million dollar budget and what appears to be a terrific cast, and despite the sleek look captured by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, one of the best in the business, the film starts out with a certain amount of intrigue before taking a nosedive into the kind of sadistic territory that America is starting to represent to the world.  If charges of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were not bad enough, Hollywood churns out even more deplorable violent imagery, where at some point one would have to ask who is responsible for writing this kind of depressing stuff, and who wants to film it and make it into a movie?  While this movie may have earned back nearly half its production cost in the first week, word of mouth is going to kill it, as this is not a feelgood movie, or a complicated whodunit, but it’s a director who knows how to build suspense, but to what end?  Some of the early reviews suggested this was a tense, white knuckles thriller that would have viewers on the edge of their seats, and the story itself, written by Aaron Guzikowski, is a suspense thriller whose interest quickly evaporates, forcing the audience to literally endure nearly two hours of torture that never seems to end.  While it may have been an attempt to resurrect the torture argument before the American public, who felt this was a topic of entertainment, or a subject we need to revisit?  More likely this is the kind of story idea floating around Hollywood, as torture porn has found its way into the mainstream of the movie industry, viewed by audiences around the world, so no one even thinks to question whether it’s a good idea anymore, they just re-use formulaic ideas from existing financially successful films. 

More than a suspense thriller, or even a police procedural, this is actually a vigilante movie, one where Charles Bronson in the 70’s would resort to the same kind of savage brutality as the bad guys, but because he was always on the side of good, avenging his daughter or protecting neighborhoods and families that the police were disturbingly unable to protect, so audiences accepted his vicious overkill, including a hair-trigger temper and near samurai speed and skill with a gun.  Despite heavy obstacles set in his path, Bronson would always kickass and save the day, becoming an avenging angel, much like the perception of Travis Bickle at the end of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), or Clint Eastwood in his 70’s and 80’s American westerns.  But America after 9/11 has become a more divided political landscape filled with moral uncertainty, where Hollywood has resorted to apolitical heroes that include mythical animated strongmen and women as well as futuristic space adventure epics that save the universe, where comic book superheroes make megabucks at the box office.  Even Woody Allen has spent the better part of a decade away from America to make his movies.  The nation as a whole has found it difficult to settle upon likeable heroes that don’t themselves remain morally conflicted, like Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a fictional TV crime boss who vacillates emotionally from the constant turmoil about being a loving father and family man while having to make a living where he’s forced to commit brutal murders.  Where in the past it was always easy to tell the good guys from the bad, in the post 9/11 era that’s not so clear, where that’s particularly evident in this movie.  Unfortunately, much of what this resorts to are stereotypes that insult the audience’s intelligence and only diminishes the complexity and overall appeal, even as the audience wades through the various twists and turns in the road, as the narrative outcome remains elusively uncertain.  An overall sense of dread is prevalent throughout, easily sustained due to the subject matter, but one has to question the methods used to advance the suspense.

In a weird casting choice, Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a carpenter barely scraping out a living in the suburbs, but also a hard corps American survivalist with fundamentalist religious roots, whose family motto is “Pray for the best but prepare for the worst,” words he takes to heart, ingraining the seriousness of it into his teenage son with a constant drumbeat.  Dover is the kind of driven, no-nonsense figure who takes things to the limit, but is also a self-righteous man that refuses to acknowledge his own mistakes, believing it is his manly duty to remain strong for his wife and children.  The cast is superlative, one of the best ensemble casts seen all year, though only a few stand out, where one of the most egregious crimes of the film is the criminal underuse of some of the actors, especially those of color.  Set in the cold and rainy hills of Pennsylvania, Dover and his family walk across the street to spend Thanksgiving with the Birch family, none other than Terrence Howard and Viola Davis, where the kids would rather play outside.  In the course of the afternoon, two six year old girls end up missing, one from each family.  After an initial panic, it becomes clear they didn’t just run away, that they were more likely abducted, where a beat up RV camper was seen parked nearby but has disappeared along with the girls.  When a police detective arrives on the scene, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), Dover goes berserk, becoming an obnoxiously aggressive, perpetually angry parent that wants the police to be as gung ho as he is, literally intimidating them not to be anything less.  Loki is a dedicated and devoted officer, but his deliberate and methodical methods contrast with the wildly impulsive actions of Dover.  When the police find the RV, they discover the driver is Alex Jones (Paul Dano), a mentally damaged young man with a child’s IQ, who is arrested and released, as there is no evidence found in the van linking the presence of the girls. 

Dover, however, hounds the suspect, eventually kidnapping and brutally torturing him, keeping him locked in an abandoned building, absolutely positive that he knows something.  As there are no other suspects, the film is largely about taking the law into your own hands, becoming judge and jury, where the merciless brutality reveals nothing, only more horrific acts.  When the Birch family acquiesces to the gruesome methods, literally aiding and abetting, the moral center of the film is blown to bits, becoming more about the tactics of torture than child abduction.  With Dover representing the fundamentalist conservative, with the liberal Birch family so easily drawn into the fray as well, the film suggests all bets are off on personal ethics when it’s your kid that’s been abducted, where in desperation you’ll do anything, cross any moral line, resort to the ugliest of human impulses short of murder in order to force the victim to tell you what you want to hear.  The rest of the film concerns itself with human depravity, even as it continues to build suspense for the missing girls.  Even as evidence suggests there may be another suspect, Dover single-mindedly continues his personal crusade, refusing to acknowledge he could be wrong, where his arrogance defies reason, yet he continues.  Personally driven in much the same way, but held to legal standards, Loki is equally determined to find the girls, where their overriding obsession dominates the film, while after awhile the series of discovered clues feels like mere afterthought.  This is a picture that may as well have the theme: “This is a man’s world,” as mens’ obsessions drive the action, where both refuse to break.  The relentlessly dark material clouds any real enjoyment of what is otherwise a well-made thriller, though the film continually bogs down in near misses and misleading evidence, so much of the time it feels like they’re continuously running in circles until the end sequence rolls, where it has the ominous feeling of an end sequence even before it develops, though by the end, one feels like they’re still left in the darkness.      

Fargo

FARGO           A                 
USA  Great Britain  (98 mi)  1996  d:  Joel and Ethan Coen

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your policework, there, Lou.

I guess that was your accomplice, in the wood chipper?                  

— Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand)

This is as vivid a picture of the Midwest heartland as you’re going to find, described by the Coens as “Siberia with family restaurants,” an overly polite and friendly place with cheerful faces but also plenty of weary and downbeat souls, desperate people who feel the weight of the world upon them.  This good and evil saga concerns one such person in plenty of trouble, William H. Macy as car salesman Jerry Lundergaard, living and working under the thumb of his much more successful father-in-law, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), who owns the car dealership.  Powerless and feeling like a squashed ant in his life and within his own family, Jerry has gotten himself into a heap of financial difficulties just trying to stand on his own two feet, but he’s up to his neck in debt and forged loans that his father-in-law is about to discover sooner or later, so he makes a Faustian bargain with two guys on the wrong side of the tracks, the anxiously talkative blabbermouth Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter and the stoic, elusively quiet, pancake loving Peter Stormare as Gaear Grimsrud, the kind of criminally reckless imbeciles you hope to never do business with.  The calm serenity of the opening sequence is literally rhapsodic, a white coated screen bathed in snow, with just the bare outlines of a road coming into view, as headlights from a car can be seen in the distance slowly creeping towards the motionless camera.  Carter Burwell’s mournful music feels elegiac, like something played out on the Civil War battlegrounds, as it carries plenty of weight but couldn’t be more hauntingly beautiful.  This is as gorgeous an opening as any film you can find, out of which comes the principle characters, Jerry and the two numbskulls sitting in a bar in Fargo, North Dakota hashing out their agreed-upon plans where Jerry will pay them $80,000 to kidnap his own wife (Kristin Rudrüd), believing her father will foot the bill in ransom payments.  Lundergaard, of course, weasel that he is, gets a little greedy and tries to embezzle a million dollars, the kind of money that would make anyone nervous, and he’s as fidgety and uptight as they come. 

After spending a little time with these three morons, the camera opens in the tranquility of a couple’s bedroom, where painted hunting decoys rest peacefully on desktops before we find a couple sleeping in bed, Marge and Norm Gunderson, the Best Actress winning Frances McDormand in her absolutely best performance ever and the implacably calm John Carroll Lynch.  Their polite and orderly world is a complete contrast from the chaotic, crime ridden opening, as a 7-month pregnant police chief is awakened with notification of a triple homicide, but her husband still has time to fix her some eggs for breakfast.  Her thorough investigation of the scene of the crime is a thing of beauty Fargo - I'm not so sure I agree 100% with your policework there Lou .. YouTube (4:02), peppered with small-town banter, where the crunch of the snow can be heard under her feet, and the endlessly snowy landscape is exactly the same looking in all directions.  Again the contrast between the amateurish local police investigation and her more professional instincts are stunning, especially as she recreates in her mind exactly what happened out there the night before, identifying her suspects based on footprints left in the snow as the big fella and the little fella.  This is a film that put independent filmmaking back on the map, as the Coens wrote, directed, edited, and produced their own movies, always having final cut, making a film packed with picturesque sequences and charming characters that exude local color, where many may think speech is being exaggerated, but some of the characters needed no dialect coaches, including the two local girls (“Go Bears!”) interviewed by Marge who couldn’t be more irresistibly authentic Fargo Hookers - YouTube (1:16).  It’s this exquisite treatment of northern flavor that endears this film for time immemorial, as the Coen Brothers grew up in a suburb outside Minneapolis and are certainly familiar with all the pertinent details.  Most endearing, however, is the close-knit relationship between Norm and Marge, living a kind of calm that represents the moral center of the movie.   

People are often seen as tiny ants overwhelmed by an immense landscape that all but engulfs them, where the abundance of snow in the picture, used to such chillingly effect by cinematographer Roger Deakins, reflects the barren interior world of Jerry Lundergaard, a wayward soul who’s lost in the wilderness and can’t find his way back home.  The puzzled expression on his face reflects his disconnection to the world around him, where his job and his family mean so little to him, always left wanting more.  William H. Macy, of course, is brilliant as the wormy creature who’s in over his head, caught in the many traps he’s set for himself.  But it’s Frances McDormand as Marge who steals the thunder, one of the most beloved and well developed characters throughout the entire Coen repertoire, a tenacious small town girl who relies on cunning and common sense to help keep her grounded through this depraved moral abyss, where the entire cast is exceptional and the Coens won an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay.  Technically, this may be the Coen’s best directed film, as the virtuosity on display is impressively restrained, yet clearly all the assembled pieces beautifully fit together, where the supposed ease and simplicity of the crime only veers further and further out of control, perfectly captured by the eerie moodiness of Peter Stormare’s veiled brutality, entangling each of the hapless men in their own bloody madness.  A film where decent and ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary circumstances, what’s especially memorable is the brilliance of the nuanced Midwest characterizations expressed throughout, where we see hostesses, barmaids, hotel receptionists, and waitresses all gush with friendly smiles while just below the surface a murky world of evil lurks unsuspectingly.  Despite the icy visualization, this remains one of the warmest, most tender works the Coens ever made, filled with a kind of understated humility that is simply indescribable, as after solving the crime of the century from their neck of the woods, Marge offers no words for herself but thinks only of her husband, a truly exceptional work that retains a power all of its own, something you won’t find anywhere else.  Siskel & Ebert both listed the film as their #1 film of the year, SISKEL & EBERT MOVIE REVIEW -- "FARGO" (1996) YouTube (6:33).