Sicario

I'm having a pretty difficult time making sense of Sicario. Coming fresh off the heels of my first Villeneuve film viewing (the weird, overly metaphorical yet somehow beautiful "Enemy") I had pretty high expectations going into the movie. It's got Roger Deakins behind the camera and Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro in front of it, and I heard that the tension alone would make the 2 hour running time fly by.

Well. Here we are. Two hours later, and I'm not exactly sure what to think. All of those mentioned above did their job exceedingly well: Deakins killed it as always, and the performances of the three lead characters - specifically Blunt's - were riveting. The film definitely went by quickly, and it was tense throughout, and yet I can't help feeling that something is missing. Which is weird, because everywhere I look, all I can see are glowing reviews and praise being thrown at Villeneuve and Co. for making what some people are calling the best movie of the year (for example, check out Rolling Stone's review here and the AV Club's right here) So... am I wrong here? Am I missing something?

To make a long answer short; yes. Probably. The more I read about the film, the more I feel like it deserves an immediate second viewing. Specific complaints of mine, like the sense that I was never quite sure what was going on throughout the movie, were more or less put to rest when I realized that Blunt's character is supposed to be in the same shoes as the audience, with the lack of info supposedly pulling us along throughout. I'll buy that, I guess, and watching it again could take away that distraction of trying to figure out what the hell is going on and the constant worry that I'm missing something.

The more I think about it, the more that I realize that I just didn't particularly care about any of the characters (spoilers coming if you haven't seen Sicario). Sure, the scene where Blunt's character almost gets choked to death by the undercover hitman was suspenseful, but I never particularly cared if anything bad happened to her. Same goes for Brolin's and Del Toro's characters. They all did a fantastic job with the acting, don't get me wrong, but the movie more or less failed to connect with me on a personal level of any kind. In retrospect, I understand that the point was, as the AV Club puts it, to "squeeze the protagonist out of her own story." It was dark and futile, and every time you wanted to see Emily Blunt kick some male ass, she didn't. This wasn't a movie about the good guys winning, or even about the bad guys winning. Nobody won. Even the characters who managed to achieve their goals didn't win. I don't mind bleak movies, or even movies that subvert audience expectations, but with something this bleak, I at least like to be left with some sort of tidbit to ruminate on as I leave the theatre. In reality, I was kind of just frustrated.


Again, I feel like I'm just shitting on this movie, but it really did have some incredibly well executed scenes. The beginning had me 120% hooked, and might be one of the better intro scenes to any movie that I've seen in a long time. Roger Deakins filmed the whole thing beautifully, with what seemed to be a tendency to center his shots more so than I've seen him do in the past. All of the night vision/infrared scenes were really well done, and it's safe to say that the whole film was more or less a visual pleasure.

So. I don't know. I want with all my heart to say that this was a great movie, but right now I can't muster up the strength to call it anything more than decent. I'm not mad that I paid to see it, but at the same time, I wish I had enjoyed it just a teensy bit more. Denis Villeneuve has a history of making morally ambiguous films, and Sicario fails to break that trend. Maybe I'll feel different on a second viewing, but I don't exactly have high hopes.

"New Cinema" and the Emergence of the Puzzle-Box Film

Last week, I watched The One I Love. An impressive directorial debut, it's a film that, on the surface, appears to be a typical indie relationship dramedy with a quirky sci-fi slant on the story. What it actually is is a one of a kind mind bender that somehow manages to grapple with relationship issues in fascinating ways, dealing with themes of longing, identity and the fallacy of romantic idealism. The film is almost impossible to talk about without spoiling the twist(s), so I'll keep it at this: Imagine Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets The Twilight Zone as written by Charlie Kaufman and you'll get something somewhat similar to The One I Love.

So, this got me thinking about a trend in modern cinema, and that is the trend of the "puzzle-box film". By this term, I am referring to the type of film that holds the audience at arms length with its meaning, steadily doling out pieces of information in a way that is perhaps not immediately graspable. It's difficult to characterize, as I could easily be referring to surrealism, but the likes of El Topo are not what I'm driving at. These films may have outlandish characteristics, but the stories themselves, when looked at closely are mostly grounded. It's the methods of telling the stories that are complicated. Like a puzzle box, these films can take several days or several viewings to figure out.

This is not the puzzle box I'm referring to.

The puzzle box film is not necessarily a "new" creation, though. In last week's post, I mentioned Last Year at Marienbad, a movie that is possibly the ultimate puzzle box film, inspiring a wider range of theories than anything else out there. Robert Alman's 1977 film, 3 Women could probably fall under this classification, too, as well as David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that there seems to be more of them coming out as of late (and made by relatively younger filmmakers). The One I Love is an incredibly mild version of this, but also released this year was Denis Villenueve's cerebral doppelganger drama, Enemy and James Ward Byrkit's challenging debut, Coherence. Spearheading this pseudo-movement is Shane Carruth, who, since 2004, has directed, written, edited, shot, musically scored, starred in and personally distributed two of the most difficult and innovative puzzle box films of the last decade with Primer, a time machine thriller like no other and Upstream Color, a beautiful, yet elusive identity drama with romantic undertones.

You don't want to know what he's looking at...
"Enemy" has one of the most startling endings of all time. 

Two questions lie at the heart of all this is: Where is cinema headed and have we really seen it all? People love to say that all the stories have been told and you can't do something truly new in film, so is it possible to develop a new cinematic language? The aforementioned Upstream Color and this year's masterpiece, Under the Skin (by Jonathan Glazer) are the closest I think we've come to doing so in the last few years. Even if the basic story is old or the themes have been seen before, the manner of expression can still be fresh. Seeing young(er) filmmakers tinkering with editing and storytelling methods is very exciting to me. It shows that invention continues to thrive and not just in the creation of fantastical lands and stunning visuals. Could it be that the art of storytelling, itself, in the realm of film is under renovation? I don't expect every film being released 20 years from now to be as complex and multi-layered as Primer, but as long as experimenters and innovators like Carruth and Glazer (among others) exist in the film community (and they always have), the medium will inevitably evolve and reach heights we never dreamed of.

Also, for a taste of Shane Carruth's unbelievably ambitious and likely never to be made film A Topiary, check out this link.