Ellie is of steelier stuff. She simply wants to document the fall of an empire with the same detached gaze she perfected while lensing sectarian and imperial violence in the Middle East and Africa. She does, however, maintain enough of her soul to wince when Joel lets a cub photographer, the painfully young Jesse (Cailee Spaeny), tag along. Jesse idolizes Ellie and the legend she’s cultivated on the frontlines, but Jesse’s fresh face betrays how in over her head she’ll be when they start encountering bodies hanging from car washes, and killing fields in the land John Denver once dubbed “mountain mama.” They’re all cut of the same cloth though, and like their mentor, New York Times journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), they cannot sit by in the still smoking anarchy of New York City when there’s an actual battle unfolding on the outskirts of Charlottesville. So south they drive.
It is a shrewd choice by Garland to make his imagining of another American civil war focus not on the cause of the conflict, or even how the first shots were fired, but rather on its last bedraggled days. He avoids much in the way of exposition, including in the still perplexing nugget of information that California and Texas have joined forces to overthrow the government. Yet the scarcity of background works in the film’s favor. As Garland has already hinted to the press, it is disturbingly easy for any viewer to fill in the details of what occurred between today and this movie’s tomorrow; and by evading the political “hows” and “whys” of its scenario, Civil War is able to almost clinically analyze its speculative fiction with the banality of an AP stylebook.
The violence which occurs throughout the picture, both suddenly and randomly, is gruesome and matter of fact. Like most modern war films made in the past 25 years, Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy utilize handheld photography to give an in-the-trenches tactility to the slaughter. However, Garland tweaks that Spielbergian standard by keeping most of the violence in clear and clean wide shots. When one American bleeds out on a dirty cement floor, the agony frozen by Jesse’s camera might have come from the scrapbook of Vietnam War photographer Eddie Adams, and the subsequent revenge killing of captured POWs certainly echo suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém’s execution on a Saigon street.
The chord Garland is striking is not subtle, but it comes through with the urgency of a carillon bell. This is what secession, disunion, and finally war would look like in America, and it’s as ugly as a red smear pooling beneath a pile of bodies. Who those Americans were and what differences they might have had will never be known by either the audience or the carrion birds about to feast.
The point is brutally made. What is more surprising is how much of a love letter the film becomes to journalists, particularly war correspondents. By structuring the film from their vantage, Garland has crafted a film that could be set in almost any collapsed state. He also lionizes a profession which has seen better days. This is best exemplified by Dunst’s taciturn performance. Underplaying every gesture, and seemingly throwing away each sparse line she’s handed, the actress quietly embodies the much remarked cynicism of a photojournalist who’s seen how too many sausages were made—and which in her case involved actual blood and guts. Yet her unremarked upon earnestness and hope for something better, if only gleaned through a wary gaze toward an unwanted protege, gives the movie its flicker of a soul.
That flicker will become a fire before the war is over.
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