Now that’s a box office hit #1 in America for the last two weekends, it’s time to reckon with Civil War. A 110-minute thriller about the dissolution of the United States into sectional warfare, Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation) offers no exposition; he treats info with the delicacy of sprinkling grated cheese on a salad. Characters do not stiltedly explain, for example, what precipitated the eye-opening alliance between Texas and California. The third-term president offers positive platitudes. There is a reference to a prize-winning photograph of “an Antifa massacre” without clarifying who was massacred. A so-called Western Alliance comprises militias from the two former states. If they have a goal besides murdering the president we don’t know it. Like Children of Men (2006), Civil War has a beat, a momentum. It works best as a genre film.
Yet the film is not the nattering apolitical film its detractors think. The Texas-California alliance is the odd one, but we’ve seen any number of convenient political alliances in the last century. The president (Nick Offerman) sounds and looks a little like Trump. The forces against him, though, are not Kevlar-wearing NPR liberals brandishing deadly tote bags — they show no compassion for women and children. Maybe the anti-faux-Trump forces realized they needed to get as dirty as he did? I expected to hate Civil War but, as Matt Zoller Seitz admitted in his own puzzled review, its excellent sound design, the compactness of its script, and the strength of the performances sent a charge through me — and he makes the point that swathes of California have citizens who would secede.
If Civil War is “about” something explicit, it’s the cynicism of journalists who frantically wave their press pass lanyards to protect their product and their lives (I suspect the NYT’s Peter Baker would miss this point); the film is in the lineage of The Year of Living Dangerously, Under Fire, and others (the politics of those films are a muddle). The film opens with a journalists encampment in a once-posh Manhattan hotel whose elevators sometimes don’t function and where you can still smoke like it’s 1998. When photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) learn that DC will fall to the Western Alliance, they decide to drive the 300 miles for an interview with the endangered president. Joining them is veteran New York Times reporter and Lee mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an aged Obi-Wan figure whose practical wisdom serves them well. After Lee saves her from a suicide bomb, wannabe Jessie (Cailee Spaney) tags along over Lee’s hesitation.
Jessie aside, they’re a tough group: battle-hardened and enthusiastic. Spotting tracer fire in the distance when they stop to sleep off the interstate, Joel admits it makes him “extremely fucking hard.” They’re not apolitical — they serve power, capital. This means they refuse to draw conclusions about their work. “You report so that other people ask,” Lee instructs Jesse in the casual way one might say, “I like the color red.” An antediluvian notion about “objectivity,” I wrote the other day. In constant pain Sammy has renounced these precepts: he wants to live.
The set pieces in which our gang interact with the objects of their pursuit bring out Garland’s unevenness as a filmmaker. At a rural gas station they meet locals who have tortured and strung up suspected looters; one of them asks Jesse for a posed photo that brings to mind similar barbarisms from the South’s history of lynching. Using music in facile ironic ways is one of his tricks. De La Soul’s “Eye Know” accompanies a sinister montage. During a confrontation between unseen snipers at a Winter Wonderland “Jingle Bells” plays. Jessie Plemons, an expert in embodying white resentment (The Power of the Dog, Breaking Bad), plays a militia leader who confronts the quartet and two Chinese friends after the latter bump into a mass burial site of citizens, in the act of being covered in quicklime. “What kind of Americana are you?” he asks this most diverse of travelers, which also includes in Joel a Latin American from Florida. The incorrect pronunciation of Reuters or simply admitting where they live can get them killed. The resentments of the Trump era in human form, not implausible because Garland arranges the sequence with a minimum of affect. At one point Jesse tumbles into the pit; Garland gives her a low angle point-of-view shot that keeps the heaps of corpses and Plemons in sightline. It would’ve made a helluva war photograph — Lee might’ve won another Pulitzer had she taken it. Less histrionic at any rate than the overhead shot of Jesse atop those same corpses that alludes to 1984’s The Killing Fields.
Civil War has many moments when Garland’s devotion to ambiguity — of trusting his prowess — riveted me. The fog of war has rarely gotten this scrupulous a scrutiny. The film film demands a theater screening room to hear every helicopter blade and burst of automatic fire. At an staging ground outside DC the group runs into fellow journalists whom they dismiss as embedded; here, Garland lets the audience figure out the irony. To the degree that they are aware I wonder whether they’re watching Civil War because they like to see shit blow up even more than they want to see their fantasies projected onscreen.
The actors do no-bullshit work. A screen presence who of late radiates a kind of resignation, Dunst calls no attention to herself because as Lee she doesn’t have to; Lee’s used to having her work speak for her. She’s most alive when slinking through war zones, her camera an appendage. Accustomed to being surrounded by equals in front of whom she doesn’t have to repeat herself, she’s impatient with greenhorns like Jessie. Moura (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish), an actor unknown to me, has the easy smile of a hard-drinking man who must’ve cut quite a figure before the war: the journalist as playboy. Although he still gets off on carnage, Joel holds on to his humanity. Spaeny (Priscilla) doesn’t overdo the ingenue routine. Best in show belongs to Henderson (Lady Bird, Dune). A cane and age may hobble Sammy, but he’s seen enough shit before and during the war to have earned the right to give advice — advice tat the others duly follow.
While the last third of Civil War doesn’t bore, it has a desensitizing video game visual and rhythmic aesthetic; if it’s Garland’s intention to put us in the minds of the restless journalists, now themselves embedded with the Western Forces as they complete their final triumphant invasion of DC and the White House, he succeeds. Yet Garland increasingly isolates Dunst in closeups; Lee is in the middle of a personal reckoning, and to Dunst’s credit she drains her face of emotion as fully as Garbo did in the last shot of Queen Christina. Stuck on their ideal of impartiality Lee, Jessie, and Joel abstract journalism such that it serves the faction with the bigger guns, a point Garland makes by framing Joel and the soldiers in the Oval Office as if the former were their victorious commanding officer. To quote Pauline Kael about Bonnie and Clyde: the audience leaving the theater, serenaded by Suicide’s sweet diseased “Dream Baby Dream,” is the quietest I’ve seen in months. Where the audience goes as the nominating conventions draw near is another question.
GRADE: A-
Humanizing The Vacuum 