Review: 'Civil War' is a harrowing and thought-provoking story of a divided America, seen through the brave and flawed journalists in the middle
A viewer is immediately drawn into witer-director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” by the terrifying and all-too plausible premise — that the United States is cleaving apart, and armed conflict is upon us, neighbor against neighbor, but with helicopters and tanks rather than the rifles and cannons of 160 years ago.
But what sticks in the memory, long after this smart and intense movie is over, is the way Garland denies us the simple dichotomy of choosing sides — our current tug-of-war of red states vs. blue states is out the window here — by making us ride along with the people in the middle: The war reporters and photographers trying to capture what’s happening on the battlefield.
Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, is a combat photographer who’s brought home the images of war around the world — so capturing those pictures in New York isn’t that much of a stretch. She notices before anyone else what looks like a suicide bomber running up to a tanker truck, and ducks behind an overturned car just before the blast hits. The dust has barely settled before she’s back to taking pictures of the carnage.
Lee and her reporting partner, Joel (Wagner Moura), go back to the hotel where the war journalists are staying. There she again sees Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young cub photographer who was at the bomb scene Lee was shooting. Jessie looks at Lee as a hero and a role model. Lee’s advice is more practical: Get some Kevlar and a helmet if you’re going to take up this line of work.
Lee and Joel have a plan to get to the heavily barricaded Washington, D.C., to get an interview and photo shoot with the President (seen and heard in pre-recorded speeches, and played by Nick Offerman) before the secessionist Western Forces, now massing in Charlottesville, Va., overrun the capital and take the White House.
The pair load up Joel’s SUV, with “press” stenciled on the doors, with the gear they’ll need to make it through war-ravaged New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. Reluctantly, they agree to take two other journalists as far as Charlottesville. One is Sam (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old war horse who’s seen even more action than Lee. The other is Jessie, who quickly learns the horrific truth about covering a war — the addictive combination of revulsion, fear and adrenaline.
Garland’s script, like the one he wrote for the zombie apocalypse “28 Days Later,” is episodic, capturing moments the four journalists experience on the road. They see war refugees in a football stadium, firefights in the distance, and awful encounters that I’m not going to spoil here. Those moments gradually have their effect on the four characters: Jessie finds her squeamishness at blood and death melting away as she channels her reactions through her viewfinder, while the others find the emotional callouses they’ve developed over the years sanded away when the battle zone is actually their home country.
And Garland, a Brit, doesn’t take sides in our current American conflict, and doesn’t give us the false comfort of doing so, either. The secessionists are identified as an alliance of Texas and California — one conservative state, one liberal one. (Florida, being Florida, is also a breakaway combatant, but discussed more as a punchline.) Offerman could be read as channeling either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, depending on which man the viewer dislikes more. And there’s no discussion of how the war started or what principles the rival sides are defending. The war is the war, and the people, the combatants and the civilians, are too occupied with surviving it to think about the why of it.
If there is something all sides should be able to agree on, though, is that Kirsten Dunst delivers a career-defining performance. Her Lee is rough, flinty and unsmiling — someone who has done this job for years, and is determined not to be affected that the combat zone doesn’t have signs in a foreign language. Her scenes with Spaeny (who, between this and “Priscilla,” is having a great year), encountering a 20-year-old version of herself, are heartbreaking.
“Civil War” is that rare movie that works as a tense thriller and heart-pumping acton movie while watching it, while leaving the viewer with a lot to chew over on the ride home. Whether it’s a preview of America’s future seems beside the point — because it works so effectively as a fractured mirror of our unsettled present.
——
‘Civil War’
★★★★
Opens Friday, April 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disgusting images, and language throughout. Running time: 109 minutes.