“Civil War,” despite its title, is a film chock-full of quiet moments punctuated by brutal spurts of violence. And even in those quiet moments, the stain of war is not so easily escapable.
During one of said moments, veteran war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) sits with her mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) watching the sky light up with gunfire from a fight a few miles down the road. Despite the pops and shouts in the distance, they’re both fairly calm about the whole thing – a hallmark of “Civil War,” in which the mundane, the beautiful, and the horrific constantly overlap – and having a conversation about whether their jobs really matter anymore. Lee in particular feels a keen sense of failure. She has spent her whole career in war zones, she says, documenting and cataloging atrocity after atrocity, hoping that a public record of the horrors of war would be enough to stop it from ever happening on her home turf.
You never find out why the titular war in Alex Garland’s “Civil War” began, a fact that might strike some as a refusal to engage with the state of American politics (the recent revelation that “Civil War” sourced archival footage from far right social media influencer Andy Ngo is, admittedly, a terrible look in this respect). But with “Civil War,” Garland doesn’t appear to be interested in the socio-political landscape that would lead to a national conflict, but rather how far people will go to pretend everything is fine when everything is so painfully not.
The above revelation from Lee is one of the more interesting moments in “Civil War,” one that plays into the larger naïveté and denial that befalls even the hardest boiled of journalists in this world. But, while this particular brand of American exceptionalism, the idea that you are safe from conflict simply by virtue of who you are, is lightly explored throughout the rest of the film, Garland mostly leaves that theme hanging by movie’s end, preferring instead to make a broader, less interesting thematic point about the ways in which we’ve become numb to violence.
Lee and Sammy are on the road with Lee’s colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young, aspiring photographer who idolizes Lee. The foursome are headed to Washington D.C., where the Western Forces (an allied California and Texas) are poised to descend on the White House and kill the president (Nick Offerman). The journalists are hoping to score an interview with the third-term leader before he meets his untimely demise.
The visual language of “Civil War” presents a striking mixture of ordinary and extraordinary, pastoral landscapes marred by the occasional empty shell of a car or corpse in the middle of the road. Garland and frequent collaborator cinematographer Rob Hardy utilize stillness to great effect. The photographs that Lee and Jessie take of the action around them are interspersed through the film, and many shots simply feel like photographs, beset with a stillness that allows the grotesqueness of the image to slowly sink in for the viewer. A shot of an underpass with “Go Steelers” spray painted on the side seems innocuous enough – until you notice the bodies hanging underneath. This dichotomy is further brought to life in a small town our foursome visits on their way to D.C., a town where life seems to have continued on as normal despite the war that rages on. But things aren’t quite as peaceful as they seem – look up from the bustling cafes, from the kids riding bikes down the street, and you’ll find snipers on the rooftops.
A war photographer is one of the best jobs to encapsulate this particular type of compartmentalization. Lee and company gawk at the people in this town who so easily ignore what’s going on, talk disparagingly of their parents sitting back home on their farms pretending that everything is fine. But in bringing themselves so close to the action, they too suspend certain truths from their minds. Garland mostly centers this dichotomy in conversations about how war photographers and journalists try to separate themselves from the horrors they’re witnessing, to numb themselves to violence. But this idea is more complicated than Garland lets on. Yes, sometimes journalists must compartmentalize to do their jobs, but that separation doesn’t necessarily equal numbness. Take Lee’s comment about hoping her work would make people in power think twice about letting a war happen at home – that doesn’t sound like someone who has hardened against violence, but rather someone with a keen understanding of what that violence can bring.
“Civil War” is more interesting when it moves away from the above idea and focuses on willful ignorance. In perhaps the movie’s best scene, Jessie is taken hostage by a couple of soldiers – one played by a harrowing Jesse Plemons – and the others argue about whether to leave or try and save her. Joel, despite his years in the field or perhaps because of them, comes down firmly on the side of saving her, believing with staunch certainty that if they tell these soldiers that they are press, everything will be fine. It’s a clever way to mirror the larger blind eye that so much of the country is collectively turning, and the desperation that often fuels that ignorance. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to believe Joel silly for his confidence in his press badge, but what else does he have to believe in?
The performances in “Civil War” are archetypal – the grizzled vet, the wide-eyed newcomer, the wise mentor. Yet, each performance is delivered with an interiority (particularly Dunst, who has so much grief and anger warring in her gaze) that’s striking in comparison with the magnitude of the situation. Despite their archetypes, there’s specificity to the characterization as well, each choice the characters make building naturally as the story moves. “Civil War” doesn’t quite hit full-fledged action status until its final sequence, but even then, the cameras stay close to the journalists on the ground, keeping the centered quality that has allowed the audience to build up a connection to these characters throughout the film.
But by the end of this impressive, heart-racing sequence, Garland falls back on the idea of how we’ve become desensitized to violence. It’s a very thematic, artfully-wrought ending, but one that feels out of step with how grounded the rest of the film has been up until this point. Ending the film this way, unfortunately, further pushes the most interesting parts of “Civil War” to the sidelines.