Kirstin Dunst gives a striking performance as photojournalist Lee.
REVIEW:
With a high-calibre cast including Kirsten Dunst and Nick Offerman, Alex Garland’s new film is an assault on the senses and strategic forecast of future possibility.
What would widespread domestic conflict in America actually look like? Alex Garland seeks to answer the question in his dystopian A24 film Civil War, rendering disturbing results and must-watch cinema, released in New Zealand on April 11.
The United States has disintegrated into multiple warring factions. Exactly how this new civil war came to be isn’t wrought in detail, just didactic snippets, and the situation has become so bad it’s almost irrelevant how it started. If you’re being shot at you shoot back, says a soldier at one point, shrugging off a question about allegiance.
Civil War follows four journalists trying to cross what was once a united country. They’re working for Reuters (or so they tell someone at one point) and want to interview the autocratic president (a perfectly cast Nick Offerman) in Washington DC before the war gets worse.
Kirsten Dunst gives an exceptional performance as the emotionally shattered, definitely traumatised photojournalist Lee. Jaded, raw and worn out, she’s countered by colleague Joel (played by the charismatic Narcos star Wagner Moura), a journalist who seems to be having more fun – or at least, more extreme highs and lows. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is heartbreakingly ageing out of his vocation, while Jessie, played by Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, is just getting started, and full of foolhardy naivety and ambition.
Together, they travel through pockets of horror, experiencing fleeting moments of normality and joy while grappling with the reality of war and the role they play. On the circuitous route they encounter an eclectic medley of characters – some trustworthy, most far from it – that captures a tapestry of American class and factions. Dunst’s husband Jesse Plemons makes a disturbing appearance.
Garland hones in on people in the middle of it all – the everyday folk who will also commit heinous acts against their neighbours, parents trying to care for their children, and soldiers following orders – while also zooming out to show the regimented logistics and apparatus of military operations.
And there’s the sound. Gunfire and ballistics at a volume that pulls you into the conflict, leaving your ears ringing after the cinema; stretches of uncomfortable silence; and a jarringly good use of popular music throughout the film to add to the discomfort.
The film has, perhaps, been somewhat misrepresented in its global marketing; the message and tone veiled as it seeks to reach a wide audience and secure box office success.
The promotional material gives the impression of a bombastic action flick, with heroes and villains, winners and losers. On the poster, snipers nestle in the Statue of Liberty’s chalice, and the trailer bears the tagline ‘all empires fall’. Prospective viewers unfamiliar with Garland’s past work, and the plot of this one, would be forgiven for thinking the movie is a straightforward, if heavy, war movie.
Instead, Garland has delivered an unforgiving vision of the horrors of civil war and the compromises everyone makes within one.
Everyone is guilty of dehumanisation to some extent, from the military to the militia, journalists and civilians choosing to avoid the conflict.
Hinging the narrative around a journalistic odyssey across war-torn North America is a shrewd choice, and invites the viewer to question the moral implications of observing and reporting, and the sacrifices that journalists make to do their job.
Raised implicitly and explicitly throughout is the commodification of violence, suffering and death, as war turned into content. “You getting good shit?” asks one reporter to another during a harrowing battle scene, as journalists ride the waves of adrenalin. Joel thrives on the rush, unapologetically enjoying the race and the scoop.
Numbed from years as a war correspondent, Kirstin Dunst’s character Lee grapples with detachment throughout the film, and there are thematic parallels and transference with the fledgling photographer Jesse. We see much of the action through their eyes, or rather, lenses. A smart device from Garland.
From the opening scenes at the press hotel to their journey to the front lines, it calls to mind excellent films like Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and Harrison’s Flowers (2000), both of which centred on journalists during the wars that followed the break up of Yugoslavia – a conflict that has considerable parallels with the Balkanisation of the United States in Garland’s film.
It also renders the importance of media infrastructure during a time of crisis – an issue that’s been in the news recently with moves to shutter foreign news networks like Al Jazeera – and its role recording and distributing proof.
More of this process could have been shown, and discussions in the New Zealand Herald newsroom after an early screening garnered questions about how images were filed if there was no internet, and what channels people accessed news on.
And while we see the photographers and reporters in action, we don’t really get to see their work in published form, or the public consuming it. We also don’t see the state of the media platforms themselves – though at one point a character quips about “what’s left of the New York Times”, suggesting most are skeletal.
There are references to other movies too. One scene is, in my mind anyway, an arguable nod to Virgin Suicides – a film about American decline and suburban decay, starring Dunst.
And when you consider Garland’s past work, from authoring the false paradise of The Beach (1996) to writing gritty, apocalyptic zombie film 28 Days Later, the decline and fallibility of mankind is a consistent thread.
What happens when it all goes wrong? And can our humanity survive it?
Those looking for an action-packed combat film will enjoy Civil War – the sound is earsplitting, in a good way, and the battle scenes are jarringly real. So too will those with questions around democracy in America and a forecast for the future.
There are no winners and losers in Civil War, though. Everyone loses something.
Civil War is released nationwide from April 11.
Emma Gleason is the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, media and more.
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