The enemy within
Civil War, Alex Garland’s dystopian drama, is drenched in sadness, at least for this American viewer. It carves out a scenario that lacks specific details about what eventually causes two massive states to secede from the US while militia forces and gun-wielding citizens pop up all around the country, hellbent on taking down Washington, DC—but it remains eerily plausible, if not prescient, in the mind. After all, we’ve seen enough open antagonism between pockets of America over the past eight years, leading to Jan. 6, 2021, to perhaps mistake Garland’s story for documentary.
Centering on hardened Reuters photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst, drenched in sadness) and her journo partner Joel (Wagner Moura), it opens in medias res, as the country is falling apart, secessionists holding pockets of the country at gunpoint, deciding who’s “American” and who isn’t. (The proto-electronic punk of Silver Apples and Suicide on the soundtrack punctuates the tense, wiry mood.) It’s chaos, in other words, and the center cannot hold. That center would be Nick Offerman, playing a blandly familiar presidential type, practicing his live address to the nation in the White House as the film opens.
Lee and Joel are on a mission to drive to DC and interview the president, in a white van clearly marked “PRESS,” with tagalong journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson from The Wire) and aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny from Priscilla) along for the ride.
What rivets our attention most is Dunst’s face, a mask barely concealing a lifetime of staring down horror and framing the shot. There’s a world-weariness that parallels our weariness at watching the ongoing political struggles that divide Americans. While Garland keeps specific political signifiers out, he does have Jesse Plemons (Dunst’s hubby) in one scene, Armalite aloft, wearing crazy red sunglasses, quizzing his detained journalists about what country they come from. Each incorrect answer leads to a muzzle burst. So white nationalism is obviously a driving force in this civil war.
Garland seems to dwell best in genre, from the horror of 28 Days Later to the sci-fi of Ex Machina, and Civil War is a little of both. He still has a tendency to only nibble away at his characters through dialogue, never going too deep. And perhaps the choice to focus on a general shock and war-weariness here rather than specifics keeps us at a slight distance. But as shock filmmaking, it definitely works.
What’s a little quaint is the idea that gun-wielding secessionists would honor any kind of truce with journalists, allowing them to snap photos of them torturing “looters” or hanging around alongside atrocities that include pits of lime-covered corpses and people set on fire in city streets as “traitors.”
There are haunting images here—the Lincoln Memorial blown apart by a rocket launcher, for example—and Dunst’s Lee, trying to instruct her uninvited protégé Jessie on how not to die, takes it all in with heart-rending despair. It’s her face that matters: the face of America, perhaps.