Director: Alex Garland (USA, UK). Year of Release: 2024
Washington DC. The third term US President is rehearsing his speech. In practise, he’s not confident, and stumbles a lot over his words. When he finally gets to make his speech, he denounces both the insurgent Western Forces of California and Texas and the Florida Alliance, and promises that order and unity will be restored soon. The speech is intercut with scenes of rioting and police violence which make you question the assurance of his words.
Cut to: New York, where the action is even more intense. People on the street beg for water as heavily armed cops beat them back with batons. A woman photographer saves a young woman from attack, then gives her her press jacket for safety. The youngster asks, awed, “aren’t you Lee Miller?” Suddenly, another young woman runs past, carrying a US American flag and wearing a backpack. The next scene is carnage, as a bomb takes out the immediate area.
Cut to: the hotel bar where journalists covering the events meet after a long day. Lee is chatting to some colleagues about where they’re going next. One journalist, Joel, lets slip that he and Lee are headed to Washington to try and bag an interview with the reclusive President. An older journalist, Sammy, who Lee knows from way back, asks if he can catch a lift as far as Charlottesville. Lee does not look too impressed, but goes to bed while the men sort things out.
In the lobby, Lee is accosted by Jessie, the young woman who she saved earlier. Jessie is 23, but barely looks half that. She is a would-be photographer, and is impressed both by Lee and the fact that she shares a name with Lee Miller. Fact fans: Miller, one of the few female photographers allowed to cover the Second World War, was one of the first journalists to visit liberated Dachau. There is a famous photograph of her washing herself in Hitler’s bath tub.
This sets up a road trip in which Lee, Joel, Sammy and Jessie drive through a war torn country in a white van with “PRESS” written on the side. The motorways are full of abandoned vehicles. In a petrol station, battered and bloodied bodies of barely alive prisoners are hung up in the car wash. A Winter Wonderland tourist attraction contains corpses and a sniper. In one town, the stores are all open and people are behaving as if everything is normal. Then you see the gunmen on the roof.
Of all the characters, Joel is the least convincing. He’s a print journalist, but never seems to file any copy. While Lee and Jessie take photos of everything they see, Joel just stands around. His ambition is to be the first person in 14 months to interview the president (why he thinks the president will talk to him is unclear) saying, unconvincingly, that this is the only story left. Maybe that’s why he seems uninterested in recording the carnage going on in front of his eyes.
As they drive through the battleground, the journalists encounter partisans belonging to all or no military alliances. Rather than trying to depict the sides as being universally good and evil, we see how war damages all its participants. Some people do not obviously belong to any faction. Instead, they seem to have joined the fray just so that they can pick up guns and attack anyone with a different nationality or skin colour, irrespective of the side on which they are fighting.
Civil War is not the film that I expected or feared. It is much better than that. You try not to read too much about a film before you see it, but I couldn’t avoid all the press chatter about whether or not Civil War was about Trump. Then Alex Garland said, well yes and no, and I got really worried that it would be one of those Liberal films which pretends not to take a side and pleads for bland centrism, while really being an attack on “all extremists” Left and Right.
As it happens, Civil War does not take a side, but this is because it is not primarily about Trumpism or even contemporary politics. It takes modern issues as a starting point, but really wants to look at the quite different issue of War reporting. It is not that the film does not have a point of view, rather that its protagonists rely on a degree of neutrality to be able to do their job. Lee and Joel scoff at the embedded reporters who are protected by soldiers in exchange for providing biased reports.
I presume that the film makers are aware that by the end of the film, Lee and Joel are behaving exactly the same way as the other journalists who they have previously mocked. Journalism always depends on favours gained. To wn the scoop that Joel so desperately wants, he needs to cooperate with soldiers who will use his work to disseminate a particular point of view to the general public. The war reporters are brave and idealistic but they do not exist outside society.
Reading some liberal critics, you get the feeling that they want writer-director Alex Garland to comment more directly on the coming US Presidential Elections. It is to his credit that he doesn’t. Firstly, because that’s not what his film about, but also because his depiction of the alienation engendered by war, and in particular civil war, would be diminished if he used it to campaign for either of 2 genocidal candidates. In this sense, Civil War is more anti-system than many critics.
Maybe its also worth pointing out how Civil War is beautifully filmed – so appropriate for a story of photographers looking for the perfect shot. In particular the final scenes in a Washington which is about to fall are lit up to show something both wonderful and terrifying. Civil War both contains compelling characters and is not afraid to intelligently approach difficult issue. After the regrettable disappointment that was Men, it’s great to know that Garland has his mojo back.
CinePhil 