Spoilers follow for the Alex Garland film Civil War, which opened in theaters on April 12.
A picture’s worth a thousand words, and especially so in the photojournalism-focused Civil War. But it’s tough to say what message a film this politically vague wants to send through its pictures — especially when its final frame is so deliberately provocative, and so frustratingly two-dimensional.
Alex Garland’s attempt at an “anti-war” epic follows a group of journalists traveling to Washington, D.C., for an interview with the country’s fascist (and nameless) president (Nick Offerman), who has disbanded the FBI, executed journalists, called in airstrikes on American citizens, and is serving his third term. In this version of America, 19 states have seceded, and there are two primary insurgent groups — the Western Forces of Texas and California, and the Florida Alliance, comprising Florida and some other southern states — who are at war with the U.S. military and attacking the country’s capital city. A24’s marketing for the film has primarily hyped up its conflict, but Civil War is mostly a road-trip movie as four writers and photographers drive the 500-plus miles from New York to D.C., running into situations that test the code of objectivity to which they’re supposed to abide.
The group is led by photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who became famous in college for taking a picture of the “Antifa Massacre,” whatever that was, and her reporting partner, journalist Joel (Wagner Moura). Where Lee is emotionally detached from her work and increasingly jaded about its waning impact, Joel is an adrenaline junkie who yuks it up with insurgents and is always on the lookout for the next hot spot to pull up to and start asking questions. They’re joined by Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), their mentor and a veteran writer for what Joel dismissively calls “whatever’s left of the New York Times,” and young photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a Lee fangirl who can practically recite her résumé — and points out that Lee shares her first name with renowned photojournalist Lee Miller, who famously covered World War II for Vogue.
The two women gradually reverse roles as the film progresses, with Lee becoming more shell-shocked by the violence around her and Jessie beginning to thrive off it. In the movie’s final moments, the two women tag along with a Western Forces squadron storming the White House, hoping to find the president. Lee dies protecting Jessie from gunfire, and Jessie goes on to take the final shots that Lee had wanted to, showing Western Forces soldiers killing the defenseless president. Jessie’s last photo is the film’s parting image: soldiers gloating around the dead man’s body, their guns raised in celebration and wide grins on their faces. Garland has compared the photo to ones taken by law enforcement and military officers in real life, including a famous shot of Pablo Escobar’s body. But it’s questionable, even doubtful, that an image from Colombia taken in 1993 is what Civil War’s audience will think of after seeing American violence done by Americans in military uniform. It’s more likely that this photo brings to mind the most memorable pictures leaked in April 2004 out of Abu Ghraib, in which American soldiers flashed thumbs-up to the camera while perched next to the bodies of tortured Middle Eastern prisoners. Jessie’s picture is the closest Civil War comes to a distinct political statement — a condemnation of bloodlust and how it infects even those we’re supposed to see as liberators. But it’s too little, too late for a film that otherwise romanticizes the chaotic spectacle of war and puts its version of bias-free journalism on a pedestal without understanding that objectivity is itself a kind of privilege.
Civil War is more interested in Lee and Jessie’s relationship than it is in the war raging around them, and begins devoting time early on to positioning Jessie as Lee’s successor. The veteran photographer feels protective of her young counterpart, though she disguises that instinct with prickly inaccessibility. She doesn’t think Jessie is prepared enough to cover this war, and tells her as much after they come across the hanging bodies of two tortured looters. Jessie is too overwhelmed to snap a photo, but Lee does so coolly, and even gets the tormenter to pose alongside his victims. When Jessie questions whether she should have helped the beaten men, Lee reminds her that regret, hesitation, and personal opinion have no place in their profession. “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop,” Lee says, and Dunst is wonderfully stern as she insists that their job is only documenting; it’s up to others to make decisions based on the content of their photos.
Jessie of course gets more comfortable with the camera as she tags along with Lee and Joel — taking pictures of a dying Florida Alliance member in one scene and of two pastel-haired and nail-polish-wearing snipers in a shootout in another. She learns to compartmentalize her emotions while getting the shot, developing her film, reviewing her best images, and then preparing to do it all again the next day. Lee, meanwhile, begins dissociating, becoming more distant and withdrawn, her facial expression set in an inflexible mask. When Florida Alliance insurgents get the better of U.S. military soldiers and execute them, an inscrutable Lee just watches. And as the snipers exchange gunfire, a tense back-and-forth during which Jessie snaps away, Lee simply lays down on a patch of grass and rests her head on a clump of flowers (a reprise of an iconic Dunst moment from The Virgin Suicides). For all of Lee’s lecturing about the responsibilities of their profession, the toll of the job is weighing on her. “I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this.’ But here we are,” she tells Jessie in a brief moment of honesty — a reflection of the American exceptionalism that guided Lee’s career.
Lee’s unmoored state of mind adds extra tension to the film’s closing siege on the White House, when Lee, Jessie, and Joel follow a Western Forces squadron fighting its way toward the president. For most of this sequence, Lee cowers in the fetal position and refuses to look at their embattled surroundings, while Jessie darts from spot to spot, shooting everything she can and sharing exhilarated smiles with Joel. But when Lee susses out that a trio of cars speeding out from the White House is a feint — meaning the president is still inside and a photograph of him is still a possibility — she snaps to attention, striding toward the building in search of the “money shot.” It’s there that she dies, pushing an overzealous Jessie out of the way of gunfire, taking the bullets herself, and breaking all her rules against caring too much.
Civil War foreshadows Lee’s death, to an extent. In Lee and Jessie’s first heart to heart, Jessie asked her, “Would you photograph that moment, if I got shot?” to which Lee replied, “What do you think?” At the White House, Jessie does what her mentor would do. We watch Lee get shot and fall through Jessie’s black-and-white pictures, the rapid-fire click-click-click of the younger woman’s camera standing in for the whiz of bullets. Jessie has been taking pictures of Lee since they met and her photographing Lee in death is a poetic, melancholy end to that series of portraits. Her decision to keep shooting through Lee’s sacrificial death becomes Civil War’s final insistence that there is a unique nobility to this profession. They care about the truth; it’s why Jessie captures the president’s extrajudicial killing. And they care about people; it’s why Lee dies to protect Jessie, and earlier in the film, Sammy dies to protect them both (and Joel) from execution.
This is bravery, dedication, and selflessness in service of educating the populace, Civil War argues; these are professionals we should honor and respect for forcing us to pay attention. But who, if anyone, is paying attention? How are these journalists shaping public opinion and the war? It’s hard to say — the film so steadfastly avoids details about the world they’re documenting, it becomes impossible to gauge what impact Jessie’s final photograph will have. What we’re left with is an undercurrent of futility: Only one character who the four journalists meet ever mentions paying attention to “the news.” Both Lee and Jessie’s parents, according to their daughters, are in denial about the war happening in their own country, despite what their daughters do. Even Sammy questions the usefulness of Joel speaking to the president now when the war is almost over and so much damage has already been done. If the images journalists risk their lives to capture can still make a difference, we never see evidence of that in Civil War.
In part, one could argue, this is because the film is focused on Lee and Jessie’s stories. And yet, while Jessie is the one who survives to take that photo, the film is aloof about her intentions, too, and what motivates her as a photographer. What does Jessie want her Abu Ghraib–like photo to convey? Is it the cruelty of the Western Forces? The weakness of the president? Does it suggest that both sides in this civil war are at fault? What does she hope might change as a result of its existence? Hard to say with so little context about the world she lives in. Will a publication run it? Will the Western Forces suppress its release? Will there be people who call it “fake news”? Jessie never seems to wonder, perhaps because the film mistakes journalistic objectivity for neutrality, even passivity.
And there’s a jarring, even ineffective quality to how Civil War aligns Jessie’s photo of the president’s death with other newsworthy images. Garland’s comparison to photos like the one of Escobar doesn’t quite work, because an American DEA agent snapped the first pictures of the drug lord’s body, not a journalist. The resemblance to photos like those from Abu Ghraib, of abused detainees turned into victims of American imperialism, is an awkward juxtaposition, too, when you think for more than a second about who the casualties are and why they were targeted. Part of Garland’s purpose with the photo, presumably, is to point out how desensitized we are to images of violence abroad, and ask why we might care more when the subject of an image like this is a dead American white man. But it matters who takes these photos, too. And Civil War ignores the fact that, for decades, especially since the widespread availability of cellphone cameras, it’s often whistleblowers (like reservist Joe Darby, who went against his colleagues and the American military apparatus to reveal their moral rot by leaking the Abu Ghraib photos), activists, and citizen journalists behind the camera.
There are certainly journalists around the world — in particular in Gaza, where 103 Palestinian reporters and photographers were killed in 105 days of Israeli strikes, including 22 killed in the course of their work — who fit the truth-telling role Civil War valorizes. But in documenting the killing of their own people and destruction of their communities, they might not be “objective” enough to fit the film’s rigid understanding of what a journalist is; a healthy remove, Civil War seems to say, is the only way to keep the work pure. Functionally, though, that standard feels like a narrative shortcut so Garland doesn’t have to explain his fictional factions’ allegiances or overall politics. Because in the real world, objectivity in journalism doesn’t mean you don’t have any opinion on what you’re covering, don’t have feelings and fears about years of conflict or the future of the country that you discuss with your colleagues, don’t make private delineations for yourself about who’s right and who’s wrong in whatever situation you’re reporting on or photographing. If you didn’t think your work could make some kind of difference, why would you do it at all? The goal shouldn’t be bland impartiality, but accuracy and honesty. In failing to reflect that, Civil War’s perspective remains underexposed.
See All
