CIVIL WAR - Mark Reviews Movies

Civil War, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 12, 2024

At some point, the politics stop, and the fighting begins. That's when, where, and why writer/director Alex Garland's Civil War exists—not before political division becomes untenable but after the fact, not on televised debates and in the midst of loud protests but in cities and towns already in ruins, not to inflame current ideological passions but to look at the cruel reality of an increasingly possible future. Those looking to have their beliefs reflected in this story will be disappointed and, perhaps, angered. Maybe one's inability to separate personal politics from a broad, self-evident warning like Garland's film is part of the reason a warning such as this is necessary in the first place.

We never learn the party affiliation, for example, of the President in this film, played by Nick Offerman with the just right tenor of a man under unthinkable strain, possibly of his own creation, trying to maintain control that's fleeing by the minute. All we learn of the man is that he is seen as a tyrant by a secessionist force and behaves as one according to rumors, speaks in platitudes of victory and forgiveness and future unity, and is in the middle of at least his third term of office.

Did he grant himself that extension? If so, the Western Forces of a unified Texas and California certainly have a case for leaving the United States, either taking up arms against an illegitimate leader or defending themselves from an attack. Was he somehow elected beyond the traditional term limit, either because of a change to the Constitution or as a response to the secession of those two states? If that's the case, the rationale for separation and war becomes hazier.

The haziness of this film's back story is one of its great strengths, because it forces us, not to take a side or attempt to morally and legally consider the causes of this civil war, but to experience it in the moment. Those moments are horrific, harrowing, and haunting, witnessed and captured for posterity by a group of journalists who know the tide of the conflict has turned, the Western Forces will be at the White House sooner rather than later, and the President's time in office and, likely, alive is reaching its end. They want to get to him for some answers before that end arrives.

Those journalists are Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). They've known each other for years—personally from covering the civil war in the United States for as long as it has been going and professionally from reputation, as well as shared admiration. Lee's a seasoned photojournalist, who has taken pictures of warzones around the world. In the process, she has become so hardened by watching people die through a viewfinder that it's tough to tell if violence affects her any longer. Given time to reminisce, she recalls faces of wounded and condemned people staring at her, as her camera readies to capture their final moment of life.

Joel is her professional companion on a trip from New York City to Washington, D.C. A sort of hotshot reporter for the same news agency, he's determined to interview the President before the end, although Sammy, a veteran and accomplished writer (used as an insult in this little circle), isn't sure if either of them will be able to get into the capital without being shot on sight. That's what the word is about how the administration and the U.S. military treat journalists, at least, but again, the specifics and truth are lost in the fog of this conflict.

Just before a suicide bombing at a watering station in the city leaves Lee as shaken as she can be at this point in her career, she meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photographer who has left the impartial ignorance of her family farm in Missouri to do what her heroes, including Lee, do. The youthfully ambitious 20-something convinces Joel to take her with the group, but Lee insists they'll leave her and Sammy at a university town in Virginia—one with a name that will perk up many contemporary ears but, in the film's timeline, is now just another stop of likely devastation and ruin on the warpath.

Narratively, this is mostly an excuse for a string of thoughtful conversations about the necessity, perils, and contradictions of journalism. Lee doesn't understand her job anymore, since clearly no one in this country paid heed to the bloody consequences of war that she photographed. Sammy knows the dangers but has to continue, despite his age and health, and Joel obviously gets an adrenaline rush from the action. Jessie's figuring her way through the terror, and two looks—a thrilled smirk and an impassive stare, not unlike the one Lee has most of the time—during the climactic battle and siege suggest she's found a couple of answers.

Much more viscerally, it leads to imagery and sequences of cognitive dissonance, as almost every imaginable notion of the American landscape—cities, small-town main streets, interstates, stretches of strip mall, the suburbs, a country club, etc.—has become rubble or is engulfed in flames or is readying for a battle to come, and pure horror. The group find themselves in the middle of a firefight in some abandoned office complex, caught on one side of sniper standoff, and unintentional witnesses to the burying of civilian bodies in a mass grave.

They're embedded with the rebels during that first one, as Jessie takes her first—and not her last—pictures of someone dying on front of her and summary executions are the norm, but the other two put them close to combatants who don't care or won't provide information about which side they're on. Like politics, such things don't matter when death is wrong one movement away or, during that agonizingly tense scene by the grave, just a matter of time.

The big question is whether or not the scenario of Civil War or one akin to it is just a matter of time. Asking that is vital, but here, in stark and uncompromising ways, is one terrible potential answer that leaves us shaken by how both questions and answers become irrelevant in the face of chaos, despair, and death.

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