A24 has made a reputation for itself as a purveyor of interesting and unique movies, often in the horror genre, that take risks that bigger studios just won’t take. The studio recently decided to move into more big budget movies, starting with British writer/director Alex Garland’s Civil War. The trailers looked intense, and given the political climate in the United States these days, I wouldn’t blame a lot of people who opted to avoid it. I mean, my girlfriend made it clear the idea of civil war in America seemed too likely to be something she would enjoy in a movie, even if the trailers suggested the highly unlikely idea of an alliance between California and Texas.
Now me, I had no such compunctions and have long enjoyed Garland’s work going back to when I read one of his novels in a grad school class. Of course I went.
America is in the middle of a brutal civil war as the country has fragmented into multiple factions. Veteran war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) are looking to travel from New York City to Washington D.C. to conduct an interview with the unnamed American president (Nick Offerman). Along for the ride are the wise sage-like journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) a young woman looking to learn the ropes of war photography from her idol Lee. Lee doesn’t really want to take Jessie along, and it soon becomes clear why: it’s very dangerous out there. For one thing, the quartet can’t drive directly from New York to Washington because the roads are too dangerous and journalists in the capital are apparently shot on sight.
What follows is a story about the importance of journalism. The four run into various scenarios along the way, all of them either disturbing, dangerous, or outright depressing. That could be a refugee camp in West Virginia, a sniper as a golf course, or the seemingly emotionally-dead psychopath that is an unbilled Jesse Plemmons, and quite frankly, Dunst’s husband provides enough menace in his one scene for maybe two or three lesser movies. In the end, they might get that interview, but the real thing here is how much Lee’s world-weariness or Joel’s adrenaline junkie ways or Sammy’s age or Jessie’s inexperience might just cost one or more of them their lives. Is that what the world needs?
The answer to that last question according to the movie would seem to be a resounding “yes.” Garland made a point that this is not a political movie–I mean, California and Texas are in an alliance, and that seems unlikely in the real world–and what little is there to the politics of this world is to basically let it be known the President is something of a dictator without getting too much into the details. There are some tense action scenes on display here, but those are only there because the reporters are there to see it. Half the time, whatever soldiers the four are covering aren’t even identified by what faction they belong to. That’s not the point: the point is to show that war is terrible, and while the photographers and Garland’s direction can sometimes make the destruction look beautiful, that doesn’t change the fact that it is still destruction. Garland supposedly chose to set the movie in America because our national and governmental landmarks are familiar enough for audiences around the world, and I am inclined to believe that.
So what makes the movie is the characters’ journey, whether its Sammy’s mentorship to Lee and Jessie or Joel’s smile that comes across when it gets the most dangerous. It’s something of a passing of the torch from Lee to Jessie too, as Jessie goes from a terrified passenger learning the ropes to another photographer just doing what she can to get the best shot at all times. There’s a frequent theme of other characters pushing or pulling Jessie in and out of areas. At first, it’s Joel helping her get the best and safest shots, but by the end, it’s soldiers pushing her out of the way so they can do their jobs. Lee, at one point, muses that she thought by doing what she did in other countries, it would act as a warning to the people back home not to do those sorts of things, but those sorts of things happened anyway. Perhaps Garland’s movie is attempting to do the same. At the very least, it is trying to bring respect back to journalism as a profession, and I’m not sure any movie can do that these days.
Grade: A
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