'Civil War' is Alex Garland's Love Letter to Loud Noises
The glee is gone.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
-
It felt like Alex Garland’s Civil War was the movie everyone was talking about this past week, and since that doesn’t happen much anymore, I decided to check it out. The trailer itself was just as polarizing, a tightly edited collection of slightly grating political buzzwords with a dunk-inviting premise about a civil war in which one of the parties is a “western alliance” of Texas and California. Texas and California?! But they hate each other, lol!
The disses wrote themselves, but it’s not that crazy. Texas and California’s differences seem more like branding than substance (which also describes 97% of American political discussion), and anyway, it’s plausible enough for a movie premise. And Civil War comes from Alex Garland, director of Ex Machina and Annihilation, who has had only one real stinker as a director so far (2022’s Men, a failed experiment in psychological horror) which seems to warrant the benefit of the doubt.
The movie, meanwhile, seems to be polarizing for mostly separate reasons. For one thing, it’s not really even about a civil war. It’s set during one, but the setting is transparently just backdrop, for what Garland is calling “a love letter to journalism.”
Bait and switches are fine if the switch is art. Movie marketing, which tries to sell you something you know, is always at odds with movie making, which tries to give you something new.
The chief function of a backdrop, however, is to be coherent and self-evident enough that you can focus on the foreground, and the civil war in Civil War is distractingly provocative, like Garland wanted to achieve maximum buzzword recognition with minimal storytelling. And even if you can stop questioning the setting, the “love letter to journalism” Civil War serves up feels overbroad and 20 years out of date. It envisions a world in which the country has collapsed but the media is still a going concern. Is it wrong for the moment? Naive? Confused? Mostly it feels like it isn’t anything.
Garland’s nihilism and sense of style are intact, but his usual wit is missing. As a friend texted me afterwards, “the mirth has left his spite.” Mostly Civil War is loud, a mixture of needle drops and war drops in which the two quickly become indistinguishable, unpleasantness in search of a narrative justification.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a seen-it-all war photographer who, along with her colleagues Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Harrison), have hatched a plan to get from New York to Washington DC in order to chase “the only story left” — an interview with the besieged president played by Nick Offerman before the rebel forces capture or kill him. Lee is reaching burnout, haunted by a lifetime of documenting horrific images (we see summary executions and a man burned alive inside a gasoline-soaked tire in a slow-motion flashback montage) while Joel is an adrenaline junkie numbing the trauma with booze and pot and Sammy worries he’s too old to keep doing the job he loves.
Basically, all the archetypes we’ve seen before in umpteen other movies about journalists and war correspondents. And all within the familiar format of jaded hacks trading gallows humor over cocktails at the hotel bar in a besieged city (a romantic setting, to be sure). The gang eventually collects Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a cub photojournalist who idolizes Lee, while Lee just wants to keep Jessie from getting killed, as she represents Lee’s own alternate history at a pre-disillusionment hinge point.
Soon we’re off on a road trip through a war-torn alternate America, Children of Men-style, never learning much about the conflict or why things fell apart. “Three-term president?” “The Antifa Massacre?” “The frontlines at Charlottesville?” We get hints, but nothing concrete, which is… fine, if only Garland wasn’t so insistent on namechecking things that carry their own narrative gravity, which he has no interest in exploring. That all of the familiar American landmarks — the White House, the Lincoln and Washington memorials, etc — are still entirely recognizable amidst the rubble, totemic backdrops for his war play, seems symptomatic of his failure of imagination. He combines hyperreal violence with comic book imagery, for unclear purposes. When you see videos of Gaza, are there lots of recognizable landmarks there?
At one point, the journalists, passing through rural Pennsylvania in their white Ford Excursion with “PRESS” written across the side, come to an abandoned golf course with a dead soldier lying in the middle of the road. They wonder if they should pass. Joel (why an obviously Brazilian guy is named “Joel” is another open question) decides to try to drive through, only to take deafening sniper fire. They scatter for cover and find it next to a ghilly-suited sniper and his glib spotter. “What side are you on?” Joel wants to know.
“Side?” the prone spotter responds, incredulous. “He’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill him.”
The implication is clear: ideology is mostly irrelevant in a war zone. Okay, fine: so then why is everything else about this war zone such a damned cartoon?
Later, when the gang is embedded with the rebel armada that has overrun the capital, they photograph an entire battle sequence between the camoflaged military rebels and the final holdout Secret Service agents still protecting the president. It’s easy to identify the Secret Service guys: they’re all still wearing their blue suits, like an apocalyptic drama staged by a child. When the rebels drag the president out of his panic room, he still has on his suit and windsor-knotted red tie, the presidential uniform.
Now, if the entire sky over the capital was lit up with tracers and anti-aircraft fire, and there were attack helicopters buzzing around leveling checkpoints with buzzsaw miniguns, do you think the Secret Service guys would still be dressed for a motorcade? What did Saddam or Gaddafi look like when they got dragged out of their hiding places?
Throughout, Lee (brilliantly acted by Dunst, it should be noted, and much of the rest of the cast is equally marvelous) tries to shepard impulsive Jessie, the two taking unforgettable photographs of combatants as they spurt blood and die gasping.
“I was hoping that if I just showed them what war looked like, that they’d want to avoid it,” Lee tells Sammy, in an introspective moment.
This is clearly Garland’s mission statement, his justification for giving us so many scenes of mass graves, summary executions, and brutal torture. Jesse Plemons (Jesse P. Lemons, as I like to call him) shows up in its signature scene, asking the journalists “which America” they’re from while wearing girls costume sunglasses and blowing them away with an automatic rifle if they answer wrong. What is the “correct” answer? Who can say?