Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny
“CIVIL WAR” My rating: C+(Max)
109 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The journalistic challenges of covering a civil war have long fascinated filmmakers.
Back in the ‘80s we had Oliver Stone’s “Salvador” and Roger Spottiswoode’s “Under Fire.” More recently Rosamund Pike portrayed real-life photojournalist Marie Colvin in the excellent “A Private War.”
Alex Garland’s “Civil War” returns to the topic but with a major twist. Instead of playing out in a Third World country, this yarn is set in the good ol’ U.S.A. during what can only be described as the second American Revolution.
This is both the film’s most intriguing element…and its most frustrating one.
Narratively it’s a big road trip. Four journalists in a car with “Press” embossed on the doors set out from NYC to the nation’s capital, where the President and his supporters are making a last stand against the forces of the “Western Alliance,” a secessionist army manned mostly by Texans and Californians (talk about strange bedfellows!).
Our protagonists are photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who is close to burning out on the horrors she has witnessed in her career; reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), a cynic determined to get what may be the last interview ever with the President; the seventysomething Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who’s clearly too old for this sort of enterprise; and baby-faced Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), just starting out in the biz and perhaps too eager to see action.
The unarmed newsmen journey through burned-out burgs and bucolic landscapes, both of which conceal untold dangers and numerous ways to die. They spend a night in a crumbling football stadium now housing hundreds of refugees. They encounter vigilantes who are torturing suspected looters, disciplined military units and scarily undisciplined militia members.
Being neutral journalists they’re able to observe both sides in the fight. Not that their press credentials can protect them from gun-toting morons who for the first time can swagger and kill with impunity. (An uncredited Jesse Plemons makes a brief but scarily memorable appearance as a morally unhinged partisan — though we can’t be sure which side he’s on.)
It’s a world-turned-upside-down scenario in which chaos reigns. Which army are we embedded with today? And the usual rules of war no longer apply.
Garland’s screenplay is a series of episodes, but there’s not much in the way of narrative. Mostly he’s interested in establishing a world in which everything that makes us feel secure has been turned inside out. To the extent that it depicts a society imploding into near-anarchy,
“Civil War” works pretty well. It’s the sort of thing that could be set in any war-torn country.
Except that it’s not just any country. It’s the United States of America. Garland seems poised to be make political points, to show how our current political dysfunction could lead to something far worse…but he never follows through.
TV and radio addresses by the President (Nick Offerman) show a leader keeping up the facade of success even as the world crumbles around him…there’s a vaguely Trumpian element to the character’s hyperbolic statements and resistance to facts. But is this President of the right or the left? Don’t know.
Nor do we learn anything about the political stance of the rebels besieging Washington. They’re described as secessionists, but there’s no mention of what drove them to that state or what kind of government they propose to establish.
Moreover, there are some big gaps in the film’s internal logic. Our protagonists may be motoring through one of the most densely populated areas in America, but usually they’re the only car on the highway (though there are vast parking lots of abandoned or burned-out vehicles). So where are all the people?
In the end “Civil War” dishes some good action sequences and a suffocating sense of danger, but never answers the big questions it sets up.
Geraldine Viswanathan, Margaret Qually
“DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS” My rating: B- (Prime)
84 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Drive-Away Dolls” wants to be the great American lesbian road picture.
It almost gets there.
The latest from director Ethan Coen (here working without his usual partner, brother Joel) and co-writer Tricia Cooke is a raunchy, muff-gobbling comedy.
Sorry if that last phrase offends, but it’s exactly the attitude on display. Imagine Andrew Dice Clay as a gay woman. “Drive-Away Dolls” is so in-yer-face blue that it’s kinda refreshing.
Taking top honors here is Margaret Quallly as Jamie, a drawling Texas lesbian with a a mouthful of rude down-home-isms and a fierce sexual appetite. She talks her straight-laced gal pal Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) into taking a road trip down south…they sign up to deliver a car to its new owner several states away.
Except that they end up in a vehicle that is part of a criminal plot. In the trunk is a briefcase with an arresting array of dildos (you know they will not go unused) and an old-fashioned hatbox holding a human head on ice (the noggin belongs to Pedro Pascal…gotta be the least-challenging role of his career).
In pursuit are a couple of bumbling thugs (Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson) who have their own Mutt and Jeff routine going on.
The screenplay overflows with hard-core dyke humor (again, not being disrespectful…that’s just the dynamic on display) and the cast is crammed with brief comic appearances by familiar faces: Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, Matt Damon.
Trashy fun.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 