Fresh from a festival run—TIFF and the Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme d’Or—comes Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin in a drama about an idealistic FBI agent working with an elite task force to stem the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. One critic in Cannes referred to it as a “French Connection for the drug-fuelled Mexico-US border war,” so expect tension, moral ambiguity and no happy endings.
After a grizzly discovery courtesy of the Mexican drug Cartels, by-the-book CIA kidnapping specialist Kate Macer (Blunt) volunteers to be part of a special task force led by freelancers Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the enigmatic Alejandro (Benicio del Toro). She thinks they’ll be trying to stem the flow of drugs from the US side of the border, but soon she learns that she’s working in a situation where the boundaries have been moved. On her first assignment a wild public shootout leaves a dozen people dead, but yet violence is so common that a showdown at the US -Mexican border is hardly news. “This will make the front page of every newspaper in America.” “No, it won’t even make the paper in El Paso.”
The plan is to disrupt the cartels. Despite prosecuting twice as many drug cases in one year as the previous two years combined, none of the arrests have made a difference. To truly get at the heart of the drug trade they have to break the rules, and, as Graver says, “shake the tree and create chaos.” That means bending the very principles that Macer holds dear.
“Sicario” (it means “hitman” in Spanish) begins with a tightly wound sequence and doesn’t go slack for the next ninety minutes. Director Denis Villeneuve has made a slow burn of a film, deliberately paced, that weaves complex quasi-morality with a sense of hopelessness into an edge of your seat story.
Leading the charge is Blunt. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she’s the most interesting female action star since Imperator Furiosa.
Del Toro is a badass supreme as a man caught between doing the right thing completely the wrong way. Vicious and malicious, he doesn’t mind collecting a handsome paycheque while quenching his thirst for revenge against the cartel leaders.
The third part of the triangle is Graver, a jovial rule breaker who calls the shots. Brolin, the manliest man currently working on film, is an edgy presence joking and laughing his way through one dangerous situation after another.
The real stars here, however, are director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Villeneuve treats the story like an onion, peeling off layer after layer, taking his time to get to the core of the story. Deakins, an eleven time Oscar nominee, turns aerial shots of sprawling cities into metaphors for the magnitude of the problems facing the police. Later he transforms a standard night vision raid from videogame action to a wonder of texture and tension.
“Sicario” isn’t a feel good movie about winning the war on drugs. Instead it’s a powerful look at a seemingly unwinnable battle and the toll it takes on its soldiers.
“Enemy,” an art house thriller from director Denis Villeneuve and actor Jake Gyllenhaal, is an intriguing head scratcher that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.
When we first meet him the “Brokeback Mountain” star plays a history professor named Adam Bell. When not lecturing in class, he leads a normal, if somewhat repetitive life with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). One night while watching a rented movie he is astonished to see someone who looks exactly like him on screen.
After some research he discovers the actor’s name is Anthony St. Claire (Gyllenhaal) and that he lives in Toronto’s west end. Spooky similarities arise. Both have beautiful blonde significant others—Sarah Gadon plays Helen, Anthony’s six-months pregnant wife—but there’s more. Both even have a scar on their chests.
Adam and his doppelganger have completely opposite personalities, but their lives become intertwined when Anthony becomes interested in Mary and duo struggles to discover what connection they have.
“Enemy” is the kind of movie that, if it grabs you, you’ll want to see it twice to try and make sense of some of the more narratively opaque sections. If the slow build of existential dread doesn’t grab you, however, one viewing will be more than enough.
But, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” In other words “Enemy” is a challenge, a film that revels in its confounding story. Like Polanski on downers, it’s willfully difficult, taking the audience down a rabbit hole deep into the psyche of these unrelated twins. It’s a long strange journey with many rewards for the attentive viewer.
One of those rewards is Gyllenhaal’s interesting and varied work. He plays two parts of one person’s personality, but creates fully formed individual characters that, even though they are identical looking, are much different in the way they tick.
“Enemy” is stylish and sinister (with a big tasty dollop of mystery on the side) that will keep audiences guessing long after they’ve left the theatre.
“Incendies,” Canada’s entry in the Oscar race for Best Foreign Film, was made by a Quebec filmmaker and shot in the Middle East but plays like a Greek tragedy. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s acclaimed play of the same name it weaves a complicated story of, as reported on IMDB, “of deep-rooted hatred, never-ending wars and enduring love.”
The story begins with a mother’s last wish, a request in her will that her estranged twin kids travel to her homeland (an unnamed Middle Eastern country) in search of some hard truths about her life and, ultimately, their very existence.
I have to start by saying that “Incendies” is expertly made, with gorgeous cinematography, great performances, particularly from Lubna Azabal as the mother Nawal, and at least one sequence as memorable as anything we’ll see on screen this year—a harrowing attack on a bus by Christian extremists—but my overall feeling of the film is tempered by the movie’s closing moments.
I have a theory that the last minutes of a movie can color the way you feel about a film. For instance a so-so movie can be bolstered by a blockbuster ending. Similarly a great movie with a weak ending can come down a notch or two in the viewer’s estimation.
Such is the case with “Incendies.” Director Denis Villeneuve—the helmer of Maelström and Polytechnique —is not one to shy away from the difficult or unpalatable aspects of whatever story he is telling, which is normally a good thing. That makes him one of the braver and more interesting filmmakers working today. And while for much of the running time “Incendies” plays like a roll call of misery, it all seems to fit, until the very end when he caps the story with a revelation so unbelievable it makes the rest of the film ring hollow. Being shocked at the theatre is one thing. We don’t have enough movie moments that really challenge us these days, but a climax this unsatisfying isn’t shocking really, just disappointing after such an interesting film.
I can’t go into details without revealing a MAJOR plot point but suffice to say that an ending that stretches credulity to this point is almost worse than no ending at all.
