Civil War

 In Andrew Garland's Civil War, combat looks very picturesque.  The movie espouses the sensibility of the  combat photographer, a superficial aesthetic in which children's bicycles are juxtaposed with burning tanks, and soldiers crouch under fire amidst Christmas decorations.  The better shots are frozen as black and white images, time stopping so we can inspect in details images showing anguished faces and deadly violence.  A final spectacular fire-fight occurs in the streets around the White House; tracer bullets outline the Washington Monument and rocket-propelled grenades burst in the portico of the temple dedicated to Abraham Lincoln; the final gun-battle takes place in the West Wing of the White House.  The actions sequences are well-choreographed and gaudy.  The movie itself, although reasonably entertaining and scary, is pointless.  The viewer keeps expecting the picture to address its premise -- that is, a Civil War in which the so-called Western Federation (California and Texas) have joined the Southern States (Florida et. al.) to besiege the federal power in Washington.  The film isn't interested in how this war has arisen, or its ideology and politics (meaningless to those caught up in the slaughter) and, so, the issue of "civil" as opposed to some other type of war isn't really developed.  (In what possible world do Californian and Texas form an alliance against the Federal Government?)  The picture could be set in any war zone in the world.  In fact, the basic premise of the movie was perfected in Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire (1983), a movie featuring photojournalists cynically capturing gruesome images of the Nicaraguan Civil War; Under Fire is more conventionally plotted, has a love triangle between Joanna Cassidy and her suitors played by Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman, and, also, makes points about how photographs of a conflict can become instrumental in the hands of the belligerents.  None of this kind of detail exists in Civil War which contents itself with showing the fighting as picturesquely as possible.  Under Fire also uses the technique of stopping the action to view it through still photographs taken by the movie's protagonists, a way to make the violence even more remote and artistic-looking.  Under Fire addresses the morality of the dispassionate camera eye in combat or directed toward other forms of human suffering; Civil War is mostly oblivious to such concerns.  Furthermore, there's a weird sort of anachronism about the movie.  The photojournalists use conventional cameras with telephoto lenses and creep around on their hands and knees with bullets whizzing over their heads.  Recently, it seems to me that everyone is carrying a cell-phone and pictures of brutal events are a dime-a-dozen; you don't need a fast-speed Leica and a contract with Reuters or Magnum to peddle "up close and personal" pictures of mayhem.  Conflicts shed pictures of this sort like snow falling from a cloud in a blizzard.  

Four journalists set off for Washington D.C. hoping to interview the President of the Federal Government.  It seems generally accepted that the Federals are losing the war and that Washington will soon fall to the Western Federation.  The reporters want to get an interview with the doomed President before he is executed and, although the older print journalist, a man named Sammy, predicts that like Mussolini or Ceasescu, or Gaddafi, the politician probably won't be able to say anything coherent when they reach him.  A young girl -- she claims to be 23 but looks about 16 -- wants to tag along with the experienced reporter; she is particularly enamored with the embittered and badly traumatized Lee, a gaunt-looking female war photographer who is modeled after Lee Miller, the first woman cameraman to enter Buchenwald during World War Two.  Lee has seen too much killing, apparently in the Iraq and Africa (or possibly Haiti) and is a burnt-out case.  She's taciturn and doesn't want the little girl loitering with the more experienced correspondents.  The movie is, more or less, about the relationship between the young girl, Jessie, and the much older and hardened photographer, Lee.  But the parts are under-written and there's not much dialogue in this movie and so, for the most part, the relationship between the two women is enigmatic, more a matter of suggestion than dramatizations.

The film has a classic structure, the journey through many perils to an objective -- in this case the embattled White House in DC.  There is a driver, also a tough war correspondent, Sammy, the morose, fat, and elderly print journalist, Jessie, the green newbie, and the hard case, Lee.  The four have various adventures lurking around combat scenes and photographing the violence.  At first, Jessie is terrified, throws up during the firefights, and, when she isn't cowering, is reckless and nearly gets herself killed.  But, she develops into a seasoned war correspondent, somewhat implausibly in the three day trip (the four reach Washington via Pittsburgh, West Virginia and Charlottesville.  In the movie's final scenes, she has the hardened thousand-yard stare that we see in Lee's haggard features.  (Lee is played by Kirsten Dunst in the sort of performance that critics call "brave" because she doesn't wear make-up and is permitted to look her actual age -- she must be in her early fifties.) There is really nothing in the movie but disillusion, laconic warnings, and showy violence.  The defining scene is a sequence in which a sort of red neck wearing bright scarlet sunglasses terrorizes Jessie and another journalist while a irregular troops unload a dump truck full of battered corpses into a mass grave.  (One of the corpses has its leg flung over the edge of the truck bed and gets caught so that the body doesn't fall into the pit.)  Jessie ends up flailing around in the mass grave where the bodies are suppurating under a glaze of lime.  In the final battle, Lee seems to have a nervous breakdown -- she screams and howls during the assault on the White House, but, in the final minutes, sacrifices her life to save Jessie.  This is pretty standard stuff.  Of course, the President is gunned down.  As predicted by Sammy, who is now also dead, the poor politician doesn't have anything much to say except "Don't kill me!" before he's shot to death.  In the final shot, captured as an image by Jessie, we see the dead President lying like a trophy in a big game hunt on the floor of the White House, while grinning soldiers give thuimbs-up signs to the camera.  

There's no real point to the movie which is parade of horrors.  It's more akin to a zombie film, in which the walking dead hunt down the living against a sordid backdrop of check-cashing places, ruined fast food emporiums, and shot-up car washes.  It's gripping in a very primitive way, but irresponsible, I think.  How are some people going to interpret the scenes involving the battle at the White House, the mortars blowing up the residential wing, the corpses lying on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?