Lord Wood criticizes “Civil War”

4 minutes of reading41 minutes

I sat down to watch Civil war thinking I was about to see a war film that doubled as a futuristic parable and a warning about a divided America. But it's not that movie. It's not even close.

Instead, British writer-director Alex Garland used the disintegration of American democracy in the Civil War as the setting for a generic morality tale – about the ethics of journalism and the addictive nature of violence when civilized norms fail. evaporate. What he produced is a conceptually interesting film with memorable moments, but ultimately let down by narrative crudeness and paper-thin characters.

Much of the premise and plot of Civil war is elusive. We are in a modern-day United States where Texas, California and the South Florida Alliance are waging war against loyalist states, closing in on an entrenched President (Nick Offerman) to the White House. You never know what civil war is. No character ever talks about it. Its implausibility (California teams up with Texas?) doesn't matter. This is deliberate, I think: because it's a film about what war does to humans, not what conflict does to America.

This is a movie about what war does to humans, not what conflict does to America.

Or, more precisely, what it does to journalists. The war is seen through the eyes of a famous war photographer, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), who, along with his Reuters colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), travels through war zones to Washington DC, in order to get an exclusive interview with the president before he is killed. captured by the rebels. They are joined by an ambitious young photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who – in the film's only three-dimensional relationship – goes from student admirer of Lee Smith to ambitious competitor, while her mentor's appetite for human detachment and The moral compromises involved in chronicling the horrors of war seem to be diminishing.

These are characters who see themselves as human cameras. “We don’t ask. We record it so other people will ask,” Smith explains to his protégé. The price we pay is that we don't learn anything interesting about any of them. These are canvases on which the effects of war are painted with rough brushstrokes. Violence excites them but also revolts them. They feel alive and scared. Capturing war requires a constraint and detachment that destroys your humanity, and the ending of the cartoon shows what happens to journalists both when they lose that constraint and when they are consumed by it.

Strangely for a universal parable, Civil war is cinematically steeped in Americana. The feeling of social rupture is intelligently rendered by familiar landscapes (the Manhattan skyline, American highways) subtly punctuated by distant explosions and abandoned cars. The set scenes are accompanied by music that samples a bewildering array of American traditions: country music one minute, hip-hop in a housing project shootout the next. It’s an aesthetic that sits oddly with a story that intentionally avoids cultural depth.

What else? There's a creepy appearance by murderer Jesse Plemons, armed with a gun, who says something about racism, but I'm not sure what. There is an allusion to the real war photographer Lee Miller (for whom the character Lee Smith is named), whose photo bathing in Hitler's bathtub on the day Hitler died in April 1945 captures something about the confused ethics of war photography, but I'm not sure what. Actually, “I’m not sure what” isn’t a bad summary of how I felt about this film. The moral dilemmas of war journalism and what it says about the challenges we all feel in the face of violence for humanity are fertile territory for art. But it’s a film that doesn’t cultivate much of the soil.

Lord Wood of Anfield is a Labor peer

Civil war
Directed by: Alex Garland
Place: General cinema release

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