2015 in review: sicario

(dir: Denis Villeneuve) All the way through this movie, I kept thinking I didn't like it. Then it was over, two hours flown by like it was a minute, and I realized I really did. The thing I liked best was the way Roger Deakins' photography and Johann Johannsson's music worked together to make a landscape -- of Juarez, or the desert, or the border -- seem truly ominous. Villeneuve uses things, commonplace things, like a dog barking out a car window during a traffic-stop, to build amazing tension.

Josh Brolin, of course, could play this smirking asshole-in-chief with his eyes closed. Emily Blunt has a tough role, spending the bulk of the film trying to figure out what the hell kind of acid-trip rabbit-hole she's jumped down. Plus, men keep wrestling her to the ground, telling her to stop struggling, which is crazy-making just to watch. (SIDE-NOTE: Still, as satisfying as it can be watching an 80-lb Angelina Jolie toss a gargantuan assassin across a room, as comforting as it can be knowing that Jessica Jones is always going to hold her own in any thrash-fest, it's also nice to see a 100-lb woman, tough and trained, actually LOSE her fights against men twice her size, because THAT'S LIFE, most of the time. The body-strength is different, and I wonder if our culture's obsession with Super-Badass Woman might not be making us feel wrongly about our own natural limitations.) Anyway, Blunt is strong, and lost, and flawed, and genuine. Her FBI agent puts me in mind of Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff in No Country for Old Men, a younger version, that crashing disillusionment and horror coming at an earlier juncture.

It's Benicio del Toro who has the most interesting role, a Mexican lawyer embarked on a personal vendetta, allowing himself to be used by whatever governments and soldiers will help him to his vengeance. I'm a big del Toro fan from way back, so believe me that it hurts to say he's the fellow who lets down the side here. Everything about his portrayal is entirely predictable. The character never springs to life. He does lots of extreme things, sure, says some interesting ones, but nothing the actor ever does, with his voice, his body, any of it, is at all unusual. (OK, one thing: at the beginning, when he's asleep, having the nightmare, and wakes up, that was the one interesting thing he did. And even the effectiveness of that, now I think of it, was mostly in Blunt's reaction to it.) This, from the guy who gave us Che, and Dr. Gonzo, and Fenster in the Usual Suspects, for chrissake. Any actor would have killed for this role. Benicio, man, all you had to do was get the strength of presence down, make sure your gestures were completely controlled, give a few unusual line readings, and you'd have us in the palm of your damn hand. You couldn't pull that off? What's happened to you?

Still, like I said, two hours flew past in a minute.

IN SUMMARY: My sense is that this movie wants to leave you with the kind of hollow, existential pit of despair in your belly that Parallax View or Chinatown or the Conversation did. Instead, it's more like when you're sitting next to a guy in a hipster bar who defines himself by his cynicism, and he winds up looking at you with eyebrows slightly lifted, forehead slightly furrowed, head slightly shaking, lips pulled back in a patronizing smirk, all because you refuse to accept the fact that all is lost, the world is doomed, and there is no hope, no hope, not one single wan ray of it. That's what this movie leaves you with, and you kind of just want to get up and move to the other end of the bar.