The Case for Sicario

A month ago, in the first awards announcement of the season, the National Board of Review named Sicario one of the Top 10 Films of 2015. Then the NBR went a step further. They singled out Sicario with a special citation, the Spotlight Award: “for Outstanding Collaborative Vision.” At the time, this bonus award went mostly unremarked, but it’s instructive to stop and consider what an honor like this means. Don’t all great movies involve close collaboration? Of course. But those of us who noticed the way Sicario worked its magic on our nerves already understood there was some truly extraordinary unity of effect in play.

Legendary Roger Deakins is one of those cinematographers for whom “magic hour” runs round the clock. Darkness or daylight and whatever the weather, Deakins will catch the atmosphere flaunting like a peacock; he doesn’t need no stinkin’ sunrise. Often the sky in Sicario is deliberately shot when the dry heat of the southern border has baked most of the color and clouds right out of it. Even then, Deakins’ genius captures variations – pale skies of faded denim (Kate’s signature color in the film) exactly match her dusty blue t-shirt – a shirt Kate wears so often her partner ribs her about it. This is one of the deceptively simple costume details that designer Renée April employs so that characters sometimes become chameleons standing against corresponding backgrounds — a precise costuming metaphor that slyly suits their inscrutable circumstances. Likewise, production designer Patrice Vermette makes sure every detail of every setting continually sends us discrete signals, low-key but ominous all the same, with a complete absence of extraneous distraction at every desolate coldblooded location. With the stark elegance of these beautifully unified design decisions, every bland boxlike government building and every parched feature of the Texas geography takes on a heightened theatrical grandeur. It’s here, with a thrilling perverse vitality, that Villeneuve revels in setting up sequences choreographed with diabolical complexity, and then letting his editor Joe Walker solve these Rubik’s cubes of multifaceted action by untwisting them into propulsive straightforward torrents of cascading clarity.

A great director who knows how to make the most of visual language will often spend the first few minutes of a movie giving viewers a quick primer on the signs and symbols he intends to deploy over the course of the next 2 hours. We’ll get a quick lesson in the grammar and syntax about to unreel before our eyes, so we know how to interpret what we’re seeing when we see it. If a director does this gracefully, his lesson in visual cues will reach us on a subliminal level. We’ll pick up the language the best way languages are always learned – through immersion – and we won’t even be consciously aware that we’re being taught. In Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve proves himself a master of this strategy.

Sicario opens on a flat expanse of south Texas scrubland, atop a knobby mound overlooking a few dozen dilapidated ranch-houses. The low-slung homes are the color of dirt, and the dirt is the color of drought. The landscape is relentlessly barren. It looks like nothing could ever take root here except trouble. Far in the middle-distance a woman is walking her dog across a cul-de-sac. It’s the only motion so that’s where our focus is drawn. It’s then that a sharp eye will see the only spot of vivid color for miles — the butt-end tailgate of a bright red pickup truck parked mostly out of sight in a driveway, dead center in the screen. All at once, from the right side of the frame, a half dozen militarized law enforcement emerge, dressed head-to-toe in assault-team black. They move west down the hillside toward one of the scruffy houses and the camera pans with them. When the men and the camera come to a stop, the only spot of color anywhere in the frame is a distant red bucket on the back patio – again, sitting dead center in the screen.

(Most moviegoers might never notice these two bookend dots of laser-target red placed with apparent deliberate precision at the beginning and end of this shot and, honestly, they won’t miss much if they don’t. But if you’re the kind of moviegoer whose eyes roam the screen, you’ll get a tingle. It mean the filmmakers who planned this opening shot knows how to direct our gaze. It means we’re in the hands of consummate pros.)

Pulsating music swells. An armored SWAT vehicle accelerates, hurls toward the front of that ranch-house, rams through the facade, demolishes a wall, FBI agents swarm off the ramp like troops storming Normandy, and the resident drug smuggler is knocked to his knees by the impact. Only 3 seconds have passed since the collision — but there are 7 different shots and exposure bursts edited together in those 3 seconds, some of them lasting no longer than a single-frame strobe-flash in duration.

Led by Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) FBI agents stalk room to room, kicking down doors, calling out “Clear!” whenever it is — until abruptly behind one door it isn’t. In a backroom there’s a scumbag with a shotgun who fires and misses Kate by a slim inch, blowing a head-size hole in the wall behind her. She returns fire and he’s dead a split-second later. Though it might only barely register, visually we’ve been hit with something else in that room — a vivid gash of color. A window was covered in a red bedsheet and for just an instant the sun filtering though flings that jolt of color at us like a hellish portal of danger and death.

This brief sequence I’ve described in detail because this is what I mean when I say some directors teach us the grammar of a movie in the first few shots – and that’s what Villeneuve has just done. This is just the beginning of the first of five extraordinary set-pieces that will occur throughout Sicario with the rhythmic regularity of inevitable doom. Already, in these first 3 or 4 minutes, we’ve been taught all the visual and aural cues that will trigger our tension through each stage of escalating insanity.

Announcing all these set pieces, faintly at first then building in volume, will be the throb of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s percussive score that somehow turns strings, horns and woodwinds alike into drumlike pumps of hypertension adrenaline. Each time one of these set pieces begins, Roger Deakins will give us a quick blur of transition colors and then his palette will flatten out into one of 5 different monochrome backdrops – sand and dirt first, then sun-bleached concrete, onto dive-bar indigo that cuts away to sand again, later fading to greens and grays of night-vision goggles, and lastly the honeyed glow of drug-money gold. Every set piece follows the same pattern across a limited spectrum of color schemes. Against each of these neutralized backdrop tints will hang warning slabs of red, the same redhot spots of danger that direct our eye to the targets and perpetrators of these cycles of violence.

But the remarkable thing is that none of the ingenuous colorplay used to skillfully manipulate our emotions ever feels schematic. Sicario has us spend long sequences in settings where all the incidental life of the real world has been leached out and bleached out, but thanks to the subtle production design we never feel consciously aware that our feelings are being deftly managed by shifts in mood-altering color.

No need to give a plot synopsis here. This isn’t a review; it’s an appreciation. If you’ve seen Sicario then all I mean to do is remind you how beautifully assembled it is. If you haven’t yet seen it, just know that Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin play Alejandro and Matt, a tenacious almost mercenary duo. They’re working with DEA authorities, have enlisted the assistance of an FBI agent, but their exact goals are kept cloudy from us. Our surrogate onscreen, Kate Macer, is equally in the dark, soon realizing that she’s the vulnerable fulcrum caught in the middle of an obvious mess, on a mission to track down a Mexican drug lord. It’s a mission that makes less and less sense to Kate the more she learns, until she learns too much.

To the credit of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, Sicario sustains it perpetual high pitch of intellectual excitement by never falling into familiar formula. It confounds every expectation we have – at the risk of alienating some viewers who want to see a more traditional pattern of heroics. It’s a bracing experience because of the challenges it presents – to the filmmakers as much as the viewer. How do director and screenwriter maintain a sense of urgency when the cagey spoken dialog has been deliberately designed to keep us as much in the dark as the protagonist is herself? When the audience is not given any more information than Kate is getting, it means we are being told the same half-truths she’s hearing, we’re being misled the same way she is.

In the hands of a lesser director, this would risk some unsettling frustration because it violates so much of what we’ve been led to expect from crime thrillers. At the very least, in film rife with moral quandary, we usually know whose side we want to be on. Even if we’re not sure which liars to trust least, part of the kick of a thriller puzzle is the satisfaction of figuring out what’s what. The trick to getting past all that in Sicario is to stop believing what we’re being told from the very beginning and instead watch carefully what we’re being shown. That’s the key. Sure, there will be obvious plot elements that fit what we’re accustomed to seeing as traditional clues and all those are deftly handled, but dig a little deeper into the visual scheme and all the psychological subtext and ulterior motives are on full display, hidden in plain sight – and it’s there where the richest frisson of discovery lies.

It’s one of the rare pleasures of great movies, the way the best ones get inside our heads. The finest films gets their hooks in us and create an almost hypnotic out-of-body sensation. Sometimes, as with Ang Lee, we can feel suspended in someone else’s dream. Other times, say, with Hitchcock, we’re trapped in another man’s nightmare. How do filmmakers do that? How does a film seep into our souls, percolate through our minds, and wrap its visual clutches around our emotions? If the answer was easy to explain, we’d all be making great movies. But the best movies do it when every aspect works together in perfect tandem. As the NBR recognized: outstanding collaborative vision.

Villeneuve and Deakins and the rest of Sicario’s remarkable creative team use camera and staging to let light, color, and framing convey narrative clues for our benefit that most of the characters themselves aren’t allowed to see. At the same time we’re given vital visual information via art direction and cleverly placed prop details. Immensely talented actors, Blunt, del Toro, and Brolin are up to the task of inhabiting and humanizing Taylor Sheridan’s disturbing story with conflicted layers of nuanced depth and complexity. When slick elements like these are firing on all cylinders, the sensations created are irresistibly compelling, and that’s why Sicario has left such a lasting impression on those of us who love it.

Now that the guilds are weighing in, none of us are surprised to see this film earning widespread recognition across the board. Like its dark predecessors, The French Connection and Traffic, if Sicario’s hot streak of industry admiration can extend to the Oscars, it will represent much-deserved respect for one of the best contemporary thrillers in Academy history.

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I’m linking to Awards Daily interviews with four of Sicario’s collaborators: Actress Emily Blunt, Actor Benicio Del Toro, Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Jazz Tangcay (herself one of AD’s essential collaborators this season) spoke to each of them in smart, revealing interviews. Jordan Ruimy talked to director Denis Villeneuve at TIFF last September.

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You guys will maybe think I’m nuts for grooving on these jolts of red that I believe Denis Villeneuve, Patrice Vermette and Roger Deakins seem to use heat up scenes of impending danger.

But take a look at the only 3 times these large patches of red are ever seen in the first hour of the film:

This honky-tonk waitress in the bright red top is literally laying out a line of net-wrapped red candles as warning flares behind Kate’s table, and Kate cannot see the danger she’s about to step into at that bar?

If there was red splotched all through the movie, then these 3 shots wouldn’t mean much. But most of the movie is nothing but sand and tan and cream and khaki and dust… deliberately devoid of color so whenever there is color, it jumps off the screen at us. For a director and production designer and cinematographer to take care to do that — and yet do it so discretely that we don’t all go: “Dude, we SEE what you did there.” — That’s a nice graceful line of visual accent to walk, and they never go overboard, never overuse it and never make it too blatant. It’s just there in the background to worm its effect into our heads subliminally.