In Tropa de Elite, the protagonist lays out the impossibility of his situation throughout the film, coming dangerously close to becoming a whiner-wuss
After yet another late night monitoring crime in the trigger-happy favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) enters his home. As he opens the refrigerator and sips from a chilled bottle, he narrates, “Yes, my friend, I have to admit, I was losing my edge.” He walks to the bedroom and seats himself beside his sleeping wife. She stirs. He places a palm on her distended stomach and massages his unborn child, the reason behind his losing his edge. He is bringing a life into this world. He can no longer be an instrument for taking it, as a crack killing machine for the elite Special Forces unit known as BOPE.
The next morning, he walks into the kitchen and kisses his wife. “Let me eat this,” he says, looking at the fruit she’s just sliced for him.” She hopes for a little alone-time with her husband. “You came back so late yesterday, and now you have to go. I couldn’t sleep...” Like husbands in perilous positions everywhere, men caught between duty and domesticity, Nascimento demands, “What do you want from me? To quit?”
But she’s in no mood to relent. “If I knew that you wouldn’t quit, I would never have gotten pregnant.” The camera, so far whipping between husband and wife, now settles on Nascimento, his head hung. As he leaves, he narrates, “I needed someone to replace me. It’s not easy to find a BOPE captain. To find someone honest, brave, with the mind and soul of a policeman to get my place was near-impossible.” Still, he settles on two candidates after inspecting a lineup of eager young (and some not-so-young) aspirants. Their names are Matias (André Ramiro) and Neto (Caio Junqueira).
“I didn’t know Matias and Neto,” Nascimento concludes. “I didn’t know that I would need the intelligence of one and the heart of the other... Neither of them could achieve my standards, but one of them will have to replace me.” It isn’t often that a protagonist lays out the impossibility of his situation again and again through the course of a movie, coming dangerously close to appearing less a heroic cop than a total whiner-wuss who can’t wait to chuck off his uniform and play daddy. But a subsequent episode — an operation to recapture heavy guns — demonstrates the kind of dangers inherent in this job, and why Nascimento cannot pick just anyone to replace him. The pressure gets to him. His hand begins to shake uncontrollably. He begins to take pills. He talks to a shrink, but it doesn’t help.
Eventually, in a situation that comes full circle, he enters his home. His wife looks up from the papers on her lap and enquires, “Is there a problem?” And without warning, Nascimento gives vent to his rage and frustration. “Don’t open your mouth to talk about my job in this house,” he screams. “This shit hole is mine, and you’ll never badmouth my squad again. Do I make myself clear? Did you understand? I give the f****** orders around here.” He strides into the bathroom and empties the bottle of pills down the sink. He examines his palm. There isn’t a trace of a tremor. He tried to be sensitive to the demands of work and home, and that only made things worse. And now he’s made his choice, the only choice one can apparently make in order to survive in an urban jungle where the wails of an infant are almost always accompanied by the distant patter of gunfire.