CIVIL WAR: JOURNALISM SAVES A DISINTEGRATING DEMOCRACY FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH IN ALEX GARLAND’S GUT-WRENCHING DYSTOPIAN THRILLER
Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny in a still from Civil War. (Photo: A24)
In writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War — the biggest film that either he or the hip indie outfit A24 has ever produced — a group of war journalists go on a cross-country journey from New York to Washington DC, navigating their way through an America in the throes of armed conflict. It’s unclear why the country is at war with itself, but the vagueness encourages inclusivity. You don’t have to be an American to appreciate the (rather blunt) points that Garland is trying to make; the movie might as well be about India. All you need to know is that society has been irreparably damaged, the president has outstayed his welcome, and rebel forces have planned a violent takeover of the White House.
Our protagonists intend to document it. Cramped in a Toyota SUV, a jaded photographer named Lee (Kirsten Dunst), and a Reuters reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura), harbour the fantasy of cornering the Commander-in-Chief and making him answer — quite literally — for his crimes. This is a man who, we’re told, has issued shoot-on-sight orders against members of the press, has dissolved institutions like the FBI, and has refused to be interviewed in over a year. Lee and Joel are joined on their journey by two unexpected tag-alongs — a rookie photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), and a veteran journalist named Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who writes for ‘what’s left of The New York Times’. Along the way, the foursome witnesses unspeakable horror, casual cruelty, and the sort of visceral violence that might leave you wanting a glass of water, or an urgent back-rub.
Kirsten Dunst in a still from Civil War. (Photo: A24)
We get an early glimpse of the film’s harrowing brutality when the party stops at a gas station controlled by armed lunatics. While Joel negotiates a fair price for the fuel, Lee and Jessie wander onto an open-air torture chamber of sorts, where they see two men tied up and left for dead by the militia. They’re spotted; the experienced Lee diffuses the tension, but essentially leaves the prisoners to die. Back on the road, clearly shaken by what they’ve just witnessed, the idealistic Jessie scolds herself for being too scared to capture the gruesome scene on film. The human being inside her, it seems, performed an override on her unrefined journalistic instincts. She doesn’t realise that this is a good thing, but Lee, whose trauma renders her practically catatonic in the face of extreme depravity, knows exactly where Jessie is headed.
So, when Jessie breaks down and wonders if they could’ve saved the prisoners, Lee shuts her down decisively, and utters perhaps the film’s most meaningful line of dialogue. “Once you start asking those questions you can't stop,” she says. “So we don't ask. We record, so other people can ask.” Buried underneath Garland’s grim dystopia, there is an almost utopian idea of journalism. The documentation of conflict, it says, is sometimes as critical as the conflict itself.
Clinical as it might be, Lee’s statement could remind you of the impassioned acceptance speech delivered by journalist Ravish Kumar some years ago, as he received a prestigious award for covering the disintegration of (the fourth pillar of) Indian democracy. “Not all battles are fought for victory,” he said memorably. “Some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield.” Filmmaker Hansal Mehta appropriated these lines in his film Faraaz, before recalling another famous journalistic adage in his series Scoop. “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true,” said the idealistic editor Imran Siddiqui (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) in that show.
A quote, however, is the only thing that Joel is after in Civil War. He wants the president to acknowledge his crimes, for posterity if nothing else. It’s obvious that the president is cornered, that he has no hope of surviving the insurrection. But he cannot be given the privilege of dying in private. A quote from him, however feeble, might serve as a warning shot for future generations, and might potentially save humanity from the chaos that it is hard-wired to descend into if left unchecked. Lee isn’t as idealistic, however; she performs her job with an almost mechanical efficiency. In the opening scene, Lee captures the gory aftermath of a bombing with the aloofness of somebody taking a stroll in a park. “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don't do this," she says in one scene. "Yet here we are.”
Seeped as it is in Garland’s uniquely nihilistic sensibilities as a storyteller, Civil War is lowkey a hopeful movie. He captures this complexity with a poet’s eye. While gunfire reverberates in the background of one scene, and Lee cowers for safety in a field, cinematographer Rob Hardy’s camera focuses on pretty flowers. Mere metres away from a dead body, a water sprinkler is literally giving life. The drive through American countryside itself is breathtaking; nature has bloomed as cities fall.
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Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura and Cailee Spaeny in a still from Civil War. (Photo: A24)
There’s a reason why Civil War is presented through the perspective of committed journalists. Garland would’ve had countless alternate options to choose from, but he decided to frame his cautionary tale through the press’ point-of-view. There isn’t a single vulture in sight, although they must surely exist, perhaps confined to their comfy television, parroting the president’s toxic rhetoric. Civil War isn’t interested in the why of the situation; but it’s certainly interested in the what-if. In Jessie’s transformation, it offers a different sort of cautionary tale — about desensitisation, dehumanisation, and moral disarray.
Something shifts inside her after the group escapes near-certain death at the hands of an ultranationalist madman, played by Jesse Plemons in perhaps one of the greatest one-scene cameos of all time. She realises that some men — and therefore the ideas that they represent — cannot be reasoned with. Lee always knew this, which is why she ushered Jessie away from the gas station torture-chamber without intervening. She understands that countries don’t change overnight, but people can. In Jessie, she finds a cause bigger than anything that she has ever covered.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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2024-04-24T03:33:59Z dg43tfdfdgfd