I Feel Me Slippin' Away, I Wipe My Feelings Off: On the Combat Photographers of Civil War

CIVIL WAR 

(Alex Garland, UK/USA, 2024, 109 minutes) 

I turn my camera on 

I cut my fingers on the way, on the way 

I feel me slippin' away 

I wipe my feelings off

--Spoon, "I Turn My Camera On" (2005)

As his fourth feature begins, British filmmaker Alex Garland doesn't mess about. There's no prologue, no opening crawl, no exposition dump. The time could be now, or it could be just a few years in the future, because everything looks much the same, except the country is at war. With itself. 

In a sense, that's exactly what's happening in 2024 with red and blue state America, except Garland isn't as interested in liberal vs. conservative as in war itself, though the film's primary antagonists, mostly camo-clad white men, have all the markings of insurrectionists. Instead, the director explores what a first-world civil war might look like, sound like, and especially feel like in the 21st century. And how it might affect a combat photographer.

Garland introduces Reuters photojournalists Lee (an effectively hard-bitten Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura of Elite Squad and Netflix's Narcos) by showing them in action, crouching fast and low, hands gripped tightly around their cameras, getting as close to a New York riot as possible, and then slipping away as quickly as they can. In the melee, Lee spots the petite Jessie (Cailee Spaeny from Garland's FX series Devs), an amateur photographer, who gets walloped by a cop. Like a mother hen, she whisks her away to safety. Not only is Jessie okay, but she recognizes the photographer. In fact, she's an ardent admirer who aspires to emulate her. 

After chatting for a bit, they go their separate ways, with Lee giving the distinct impression she thinks this kid is a bit of an idiot. She's not wrong--though 23, Jessie looks and acts much younger. If Lee seems condescending or judgmental, it's more that she wants to dispel Jessie's naïve and idealistic views of photojournalism, but without completely scaring her away.

That night, she runs into Jessie at the hotel where she has returned to connect with Joel and Sammy (the always welcome Stephen McKinley Henderson from Devs and Dune), an older New York Times reporter. 

Jessie swears--not all that convincingly--she hasn't been stalking her, but Lee has her doubts. The younger woman explains that the hotel serves as a known meeting place for photojournalists, and she wants to get in on the action. To Lee, she's starting to become as annoying as a relentless gnat. 

Though she and Joel make a few japes about Sammy's age, he can take it, and he's just as quick to make the occasional self-deprecating remark (it doesn't help Sammy's cause that he hikes his sansabelt pants up as high as they can go). If he's more patient and philosophical than his less seasoned colleagues, he's also a softer touch. Consequently, Lee wakes up to find that he has invited Jessie to join the crew for a treacherous trip to Washington DC where Joel hopes to interview the embattled President (Nick Offerman, also from Devs). 

As much as Spaeny impressed me in Priscilla, she's fairly insufferable here, which may be the point, but I was never certain since she's positioned as an audience surrogate, and those kinds of characters tend to be more sympathetic. They serve as conduits to sights and sounds likely to be unfamiliar to most audience members, except she consistently makes the same stupid mistakes, and doesn't seem to be especially perturbed by her incompetence. Even at the end, when she has supposedly learned a thing or two about close-range combat photography, adults in her vicinity are constantly pushing her out of the way of gunfire as if she were a child. 

I don't mean to harp too much on Spaeny, but she's also positioned as a sort of Eve Harrington figure, which makes Lee the film's designated Margo Channing, and the final sequence bears out this reading in an exceptionally blunt manner. It just felt as if Garland had combined two archetypes in a way that never fully coalesced. Then again, it's not as if the world is exactly bereft of self-involved young people who are just as likely to endanger themselves as others by letting their passions get away from them.

Though "war" is right there in the title, I found myself caught up more in the interpersonal dynamics than the harrowing battles the photojournalists witness along their travels. In that sense, the film reminded me of Danny Boyle's brilliant 28 Days Later, for which Garland wrote the screenplay. Instead of "rage zombies," it's humans--and high-powered weaponry--that represent the biggest threat to the protagonists. 

Though some viewers have decried the film's apolitical stance, I wouldn't go that far. It may not be as pointedly political as they would prefer, but there are numerous references to our Divided States of America, as a 2016 episode of Frontline put it. For one thing, no one trusts the President. He's just an empty suit saying scripted words devoid of any real meaning. He's an Orwellian figure in a shinier package. He isn't Trump, but he's lost control of his country, and he's mostly just cowering in his taxpayer-funded mansion. 

Another is the militia man played by Jesse Plemons (reuniting with wife Kirsten Dunst, in a manner of speaking, after their turn as a married couple in The Power of the Dog). His xenophobic cruelty knows no bounds. Though he lacks a red cap, he's got eerie red sunglasses instead. Close enough. As chilling as Plemons was in Breaking Bad, he's absolutely terrifying here. 

Then there are the Deliverance-style sadists at the gas station. More of the same, basically. And it's impossible not to recall the incendiary imagery of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol when rebel forces, with the photojournalists embedded, storm the White House at the end.   

None of this is to suggest that Garland is giving Peter Watkins a run for the money, but his antifascist sympathies are clear (nonetheless, he has been taken to task for using footage shot by right-wing troll Andy Ngo and by thanking controversial Guardian journalist Helen Lewis in the credits). 

For my money, Garland still hasn't topped, or even equaled, his first two science fiction films, Ex Machina and Annihilation (which he hoped to turn into a series), but I'll take Civil War over Men, his decidedly feminist, if unsatisfying take on folk horror. Every one of these films, in addition to Devs, which wasn't renewed for a second season, features women at the center of the action, and it's one of the defining characteristics of his work. 

If I found Cailee Spaeny irritating for reasons possibly beyond her control, I came away more impressed, as I often am, by Kirsten Dunst. Unusually for a former child actor, she makes no attempt to present Lee as likeable, in favor of respectable, but Jessie isn't wrong when she says, "You're pretty when you smile," which she doesn't do often. She's just a strong woman doing a tough job against unbelievable odds, much like the women of Annihilation.

Dunst's character represents a past--an experienced, dedicated journalist--that is rapidly disappearing, while Jessie--an easily distracted amateur--represents the future. It's no wonder Lee's smiles are in short supply.

Civil War opens Thurs, Apr 11, at the Uptown, most everywhere else on Fri, Apr 12. Images: IMDb (Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura), AnOther Magazine (Cailee Spaeny), the IMDb (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Decider (Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, and Naomie Harris in 28 Days Later), Screen Rant (Spaeney and Jesse Plemons), and Yahoo Movies (Dunst).