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‘Civil War’ May Not Be the Movie You’re Expecting [1]
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Date: 2024-05-02
Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
The choice to make and release a movie about a modern-day American civil war, here in 2024, is a bold one, to say the least. The resulting work, the recently released “Civil War,” can come across as far less bold in its exploration of the political schisms defining American life today. Depending on the expectations you bring into it, you might find it edgy but empty or an entirely toothless exercise that does little more than remind us that, yes, war is indeed bad.
There is some merit to these reactions, but I admired how the film chose to sidestep our current discourse to tell a different, more elemental story. It comes at a meaningful moment, and I expect its message may hold up better into a turbulent, uncertain future.
An official trailer for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (via A24 on YouTube).
Battle Lines
If “Civil War” had leaned hard into real-world current affairs to frame its story, one might expect the “urban-rural divide” to play a notable role.
Look no further than periodic news headlines about outlying geographic coalitions seeking to secede from their nearest major cities, rebelling against prescribed state borders and seeking to join up with more like-minded neighbors. Or see also high-profile federal showdowns with anti-government groups in remote Western locales, from the Bundy standoffs to the Montana Freemen.
That’s not the route the film goes, which is good because, as Daily Yonder reporting has noted, rural people don’t have a monopoly on anti-government sentiments. The notion of the edge cases cited above escalating into a full-on civil war would be even more farfetched than the setup the film does opt for: the states of Texas and California joining forces to remove a president abusing and clinging onto power. Much has been made of the preposterousness of the Texas-California coalition, but that’s sort of the point.
“Civil War” isn’t particularly interested in the detailed political agendas of the parties on each side of the conflict or how they came to clash. The state of play is subtly worked into characters’ dialogue, revealed gradually over the course of the story. The film’s foremost goal is to immerse you in an environment, to closely examine and consider its consequences. Like an image in a funhouse mirror, the “Western Forces of Texas and California” is one feature among many meant to shape our reflections: this is definitively not the world we know, but it’s not entirely unrecognizable either.
In other words, your understanding of America’s present political factions and fissures isn’t likely to be of much help here.
Kirsten Dunst as photojournalist Lee Smith in ‘Civil War.’ (Credit: A24 via IMDb).
While the story begins in New York City and ends in Washington, D.C., the bulk of the film takes place in between the two, following a team of journalists as they trek to the front lines of the conflict, in search of photos and a story. The journey is fraught, hardly a carefree ride down the Acela corridor but rather a road trip inland through abandoned, desolate, or disputed territory. Along the way they witness ghastly conflict and pockets of effective lawlessness.
The brutality is punctuated by brief moments of peace and relative normalcy, found while camping around derelict industrial properties, visiting aid sites, or passing through out-of-the-way small towns. As if to answer a looming question about where all the people went, incidental dialogue speaks of parents and loved ones holing up on farms in Missouri or Colorado, waiting for things to blow over. Canada also comes up in one exchange.
These quiet moments underscore how “Civil War” is at its core a character-driven film, with everything being filtered through the first-hand experiences, emotional arcs, and emerging relationships of our core cast. The fact that these leads are journalists is perhaps the most patently political choice the film makes, inviting the opportunity to study their unique role and responsibilities amid the ongoing conflict and the events that preceded it.
Embedded
As alluded to earlier, the filmmakers behind “Civil War” appeared intent on delivering a film that could, in theory, appeal to people of all political stripes – or at least not immediately alienate half the audience. That to a large extent has seemed to work, with the film topping the box office two weeks in a row, performing equally well in red and blue states, and drawing proportionate attendance from both liberals and conservatives, according to audience polls.
One wonders what those audiences might be taking away from the film.
Because it’s no secret that journalism is itself a hot political football, in an electoral environment rife with invocations of “fake news,” “enemy of the people,” and many other threats that go beyond words. The journalists in “Civil War” wrestle with whether their work has made any difference as conditions have devolved around them, and it’s natural for those questions to quickly become metatextual: what difference will “Civil War” make in our world? Will it at all ease political divisions and civic dysfunction or at least bring added understanding and appreciation around the work of journalists? Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny play photojournalists in ‘Civil War’ (2024) (Credit: A24 via IMDb).
Critics who’ve called out the film for cowardice or “bothsidesism” would assuredly argue those answers are no, and that the film would have had a bigger impact by more vehemently expressing a point of view or showcasing some stronger political and moral convictions. Whether by design or not, this mirrors the very same conversations that are being had about the profession of journalism today.
On the surface, “Civil War” would appear to take a side in that tussle, lining up with the traditionalists who champion old-fashioned journalistic objectivity as opposed to those who contend the times we’re in demand a more urgent, crusading approach. Even that may oversimplify things however, given the characters’ own aforementioned angst about their work – and the fact that two of our protagonists face dramatic, culminating moments in their arcs upon being forced to confront the choice of observing or intervening.
Ultimately, “Civil War” is inclined to live within those tensions, staying in their complexity instead of resolving or releasing them.
It is in any case a provocative film from a provocative filmmaker – consider writer-director Alex Garland’s previous works on no less trivial subjects including artificial intelligence, metaverses, and misogyny and misandry. However, with much of our media today optimized to provoke ready reactions of anger, agreement, disgust, or disagreement, a movie that aims to provoke instead a more slow-burning sense of contemplation and reflection seems worthy of America’s time and attention.
Civil War is currently playing in theaters.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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