Kirsten Dunst plays a photojournalist scarred by combat in Civil war.
Murray Farm/A24
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Kirsten Dunst plays a photojournalist scarred by combat in Civil war.
Murray Farm/A24
Release of a film titled Civil war in this election year is certainly a way to grab headlines. Surprisingly, however, Alex Garland’s ambitious new thriller largely skirts the politics of the present moment.
He wants to sound a nauseating alarm, as if the apocalyptic scenario of democracy he shows us could actually happen, but it’s difficult to buy into a premise that seems so vaguely sketched. The story takes place in the not-so-distant future where Texas and California have joined forces and seceded from the United States.
Florida, which is not to be outdone, has also stood out on its own. The president, a third-term tyrant played by Nick Offerman, responded by calling in the troops and launching airstrikes on his fellow Americans, plunging the country into poverty and anarchy.
Garland keeps a lot of details vague; he is less interested in how we could have gotten here than in how we would react. It does this by focusing on characters whose job it is to document what is happening.
Kirsten Dunst gives a strong and determined performance as Lee, a talented photojournalist who has covered conflicts around the world and now faces this nightmare on home turf. She travels from New York to Washington, D.C., where many expect the war, which has been raging for some time, to end in a showdown at the White House.
Lee is accompanied on this dangerous journey by two seasoned colleagues: Joel, a cunning journalist played by Wagner Moura from Narcosand Sammy, a veteran political writer played by the always exceptional Stephen McKinley Henderson.
America in Civil war seems both familiar and unfamiliar.
A24
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A24
America in Civil war seems both familiar and unfamiliar.
A24
Per cinema convention, there’s also a young, inexperienced outsider: Jessie, an aspiring war photographer played by Cailee Spaeny, the star of last year’s biopic. Priscilla. Shortly after their trip, the four journalists stumble upon a tense scene at a gas station where three armed men are holding two other men captive. The journalists escape without incident, but Jessie is deeply troubled by what she saw and disappointed that she failed to take a single photo.
Over time, Jessie gets better at her job; more than that, she becomes addicted. The film is partly about the addictive thrill of placing a camera in a war zone. But it’s also about the trauma and desensitization these photographers experience when they put their emotions aside and do everything they can to get the perfect shot.
Civil war itself was visualized quite strikingly by cinematographer Rob Hardy and production designer Caty Maxey. They show us an America that seems both familiar and unfamiliar, resembling the battlefields we’ve seen in images of other conflicts elsewhere. There are surreal and eerie images of blood-stained sidewalks, bombed buildings and a once-busy highway where rows of abandoned cars stretch for miles and miles. Garland has a real eye for post-apocalyptic landscapes, as seen in his script for the zombie thriller 28 days later. In the films he has directed since, such as the brilliant Annihilationhe shows a real talent for creating suspense and anxiety.
But as incredibly detailed as Civil warThe dystopia of is that, from moment to moment, I barely believed what I was seeing. As Lee and his friends move closer to DC, they move from one violent setting to another, each calculated for maximum terror.
There’s a nasty ambush at a Christmas theme park in the middle of nowhere, followed by a chilling encounter with a gun-wielding racist psychopath played, bitingly, by Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s off-screen husband . The result is more of a button-pushing genre exercise than a serious reckoning with the consequences of the film’s premise. By the time the characters arrive at their destination, just in time for a daring raid on the White House, Civil war it looks more and more like a meaningless stunt – a thought experiment that hasn’t been particularly well thought out.
If there’s one thing that sticks out for you, it’s Dunst’s performance as a battle-scarred professional doing her job under horrific circumstances that leave her too numb to feel horrified. As she showed in her superb performance in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholy, there is something about Dunst that is particularly well suited to apocalyptic material. I wish him better vehicles than Civil war in the future, but it’s gratifying to see her still fronting a major film. She’s an actress I would follow to the ends of the earth and back.
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