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Civil War
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This is the sort of movie a 15-year-old, aspiring filmmaker would dream up – and, perhaps in Alex Garland’s case, nurse for decades until the opportunity arose to realise that dream. Impending Apocalypse in the form of Total Social Breakdown (of USA, because nowhere else in the world matters) – wow, what a cinematic spectacle! A 21st Century Civil War scenario that has less political specificity than the switcheroo-orgy of The Hunt (2020) – but hey, that’s the whole point, it's a senseless, confused chaos of left-and-right joined in unholy, angry alliance against a Trump-like President … But hang on, wasn’t it Trump who, IRL, called for a mass insurrection to storm and trash the White House, like we see here? Doesn’t matter! The centre cannot hold! Everything is collective madness! Savage Animal Nature rules! Politics has no meaning in this Strange New World! And all filtered through a youthful strain of cinephilia: being 15 or 18 or 21 and seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Shame (1968) – the war battlefield is an amoral Hell that messes up innocence and guilt, man! – and Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (1967). That infinite, body-strewn traffic jam, what an image! And, in that act of dutiful homage, a typically brainless, over-mythologised bit of contemporary nostalgia: 1968, the crazy year in which Civilisation almost burned down! Let’s recreate that for our time. And why not? There’s enough resonance and affinity to get that wagon moving … For about the first half or even two-thirds of Civil War, I was ready to give it the benefit of doubt. Its premise is to be largely ‘on the road’, with a gang of characters approaching, being part of, then fleeing zones of violent action – and not much wider context than that, save for a few media grabs (like the Presidential speech). OK, let’s accept that as a convention, for it’s the way of many fine war-related films including Shame and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998): as spectators we’re along for the ride, encountering the muck as the characters do, as it unfolds, in medias res. When the bullets are whizzing right past you, I concede, the context can surely be hard to see or reflect upon. It’s just: Kill or Be Killed! The Soldier’s POV. Which is the opposite to the sort of war narrative that’s all about boardroom political machination, Paths of Glory (1957) style – although Stanley Kubrick was canny enough to include both plot models in that classic. And there’s something oddly calm and laid-back for quite a lot of this narrative ride in Civil War – an ambience stoked by the intriguing music choices (eg., the ambient doom-pop of Alan Vega). The team drives and drives … and not so immediately or automatically do events escalate into the dog-kill-dog thrill-clinches we instantly expect. There’s a minimalist vibe here (in an otherwise very expensive, effects-heavy production) that reminded me of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): compare the ‘encroaching atmospheric menace’ of one such Civil War stop-over with the corresponding section in Hellman, where the car-race crew dag around depopulated streets until the morning rituals of rednecks slowly begin, and it’s suddenly high time for our hippy-ish heroes to tear out of there … The tipping-point of Civil War, in this respect, is the high-spirited scene of friendly banter and exchange between the collegial occupants of two cars on a country road … until one of those cars simply vanishes from view up ahead. And that introduces the only vignette in which we see openly violent, racist behaviour – as well as another recreated cine-media-iconographical nod, this time to Holocaust imagery (massed bodies in a pit). The moral of this bit of the story would seem to be: don’t go joy-riding during wartime! But now to the only thing that Civil War is really about – no matter how increasingly dopey the idea becomes as the film inexorably proceeds into a blizzard of historic gunfire. Writer-director Garland – I’ve been intrigued by aspects of his previous work, in Annihilation (2018) and the TV series Devs (2020) – makes his central characters journalists. Joel (Wagner Moura, post-Pablo Escobar portrayals) is a writer-interviewer whom we almost never see either writing or interviewing (he seems more like a tour guide); and Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a photographer – black-and-white stills in the classic photojournalistic mode! – who turns a detached, amoral dead-eye (Dunst’s signature look from The Virgin Suicides [1999] to the dire Melancholia [2011]) upon everything that must be documented. And here’s the nub of it. Let others reflect on the world’s ethics, Lee remarks. She’s just there to get the shot, to nail the truth! Even if that truth is the death of one of her own, dear comrades? You bet! Oh, how tragic, how horrible this whole journalistic-machine is! How cold, how uncommitted, how inhuman! And that’s all that Civil War has to say about anything. To round out the contents of the car, we have an old, ailing guy (Stephen McKinley Henderson as Sammy) – he represents “what’s left” of The New York Times, whatever that means – and an eager rookie, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who idolises the famous Lee: she wants to be her, do just like her and, indeed, she will get to realise that exact wish in the finale. Oh, the infernal cycles of Hell! It didn’t bother me, especially – even if it pressed the usual jukebox button of complaint in many reviewers – that these four central characters function more as allegorical, cardboard cut-out figures or types than 3D human beings; they stand for a (moderate) clash of values and attitudes, not a familial hot-house of relations and emotions. That’s why, for example, there is absolutely no sexual tension evident on this road trip! Yet what sense does any of this set-up make? I don’t always (in fact, rarely) need or call for verisimilitude in cinematic fiction, but the dreamy, completely unbelievable vagueness of the given situation in Civil War returns us to the hyped-up movie-dreams of a 15-year-old’s sensibility. We have a (very) old-school writer and photographer, way outside of their time. They never use video – or even colour! They’re not the ‘embedded’, ideologically-slanted or censored journalists we have come to know in reality (and in films including Marco Bellocchio’s brilliant Sweet Dreams, 2016) – bizarrely, they’re given a free Press pass by all sides in this War to not only tag along behind, but also to be about two inches away from the machine-gun-firing action. Only when somebody “doesn’t want to be photographed” does menace ever directly loom for these quasi-immortal journos … Who do Joel and Lee work for exactly, where and what do they publish? Beyond a couple of initial references to (impeded) online access, we never see them downloading or sending off anything anywhere – least of all, to the renegade Internet that one would imagine thrives in such a lawless, insane world (like ours). If Lee and Joel die with their cameras and sound recorders in the midst of capturing the action, we can only assume The True Story dies with them. That’s why we need The Young One present, to perpetuate the system and keep the awful wheel spinning … Some bright spark should digitally superimpose Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (Lee Kang-sheng) placidly inching his way through the war-torn tableaux of Civil War. That, I would pay to see. © Adrian Martin 3 June 2024 |
