Civil War (2024)

America "in the Twilight Zone"

or

"You Never Know What's Coming Around the Next Corner."

There was part of me that wanted to write a long preamble prior to watching Alex Garland's Civil War and lead with that. I'm glad I resisted that idea. Because if there's one thing I've learned about Alex Garland is that he never makes the movie you expect he's going to make. That was true of Ex Machina and Annihlation and Men. None of those—two of them sci-fi and one out-and-out horror film—defied expectations and were something completely different from either your expectations or experiences. You may come out confused, or disoriented, but you would hardly be bored.

You might even walk out pissed off.

But, not bored.

But, Civil War is not science fiction, it's speculative fiction (and oblique speculative fiction, at that)...there's no fancy technology—this war is conducted with Humvee's, automatic weapons, and helicopters (there's not even a drone in sight!). It's speculative...but not the way you might think it is...like, with some recognizable political perspective that reflects the fractured state we appear to be in now. There's plenty of things for people to cherry-pick (we'll look at those), but just as many things to confound that perspective (we'll look at those, too).

The President (Nick Offerman) is preparing a speech to the Nation about America's latest victories in the war with the "Western Front"—a group of secessionist states at war with the government. "It is," in his words, "the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns."

That's hardly "The War to End All Wars" language. But, it is enough to raise literal questions among a quartet of journalists embarking to set off to Washington D.C. to try to interview the President, despite POTUS labeling the press as "enemy combatants." The group is Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran reporter who writes "for what's left of The New York Times" and who labels the President's latest announcement as "nothing, he could have chosen words at random; Joel (Wagner Moura), a war correspondent from Reuters, who seems to have a "jones" for being in the thick of the action; Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a award-winning photojournalist, also from Reuters; and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young up-and-coming photojournalist wannabe, whom Lee saved from getting concussed by a bombing of an Environmental Protection truck at a New York City protest. Sammy walks with a cane and Lee thinks he's too old and too fat to be useful where they're going, and she's pissed at Joel for letting Jessie talk him into letting her go on their journey. She thinks all the "baby-sitting" will get in the way of getting the story.

Their passengers should be the least of her worries. The 857 mile trip to D.C. will be littered with evidence of a country in crisis. Major highways are clogged with abandoned cars, shopping malls appear to be ground-zeros for attacks with crashed choppers in the paring lot and the ubiquitous short-stay high-rise hotels are chunked by missile damage. Tracers dot the skies at night amid the muffled reports of automatic weapons fire. Snipers occupy roof-tops, and an abandoned stadium is a handy, if crowded refugee camp for Americans bombed out of their living quarters. Spielberg tried to depict the concept of "American refugees" in his version of War of the Worlds, but Garland's version has all the verisimilitude of the nightly news, only a bit tidier.

So, what happened to us? Nothing is spelled out—we aren't given a long opening crawl to read at the beginning—we're just plopped down in the middle of the chaos (not unlike Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool) to learn what we can. Some of it sounds plausible: possible questions the group might ask when they reach their destination are tossed around like "Mr. President, do you have any regrets during your third term?" (third term?) "How about your dismantling of the FBI?" "Do you regret ordering air-strikes on American citizens?" When they stop to get gas, the surly militia guys guarding the pumps won't fill the tank for $300...but they will for $300, "Canadian."

But, there are disconnects that take you out of direct parallels: Lee is most famous for "the legendary picture of 'the Antifa massacre'." The "Western Forces" moving into Washington D.C. are a combined unit of the states of California and Texas (with reinforcements from the "Florida Alliance"). Both of those concepts jolt you out of thinking Civil War has anything to do with reality, but its concept of a trigger-happy America with grudges around every corner skews a bit closer to the home we know. As is the section where they drive through a seemingly normal rural town—reminded that there's a civil war going on, a shop-clerk says "we try to stay out of it" while the roof-tops are scouted by snipers.

The civil war isn't really the focus of the movie, either, but the back-drop in which reporters have to thread their way through "unprecedented times" to "get the story." And record truth in the same way they record conflicts in foreign countries. The good and the bad, but mostly bad. And they do it unblinking because someone has to look. And tell the tale. So others can decide. Although Lee admits that when she was covering foreign hot-spots, she was hoping to send home the message "Don't Do This."

 

For all the good it did. Most people ignore it or "stay out of it." Lucky them.

"Where's Joel?"

"Processing..."

For however preposterous the particulars, the general idea is that it can happen here...and might. And then the Constitution starts shredding, as people start to force their own interpretation on others. There is one cracker-jack of a scene—at some point it'll show up as a Sunday "Don't Make a Scene"—that features an un-billed Jesse Plemons as a militiaman in charge of a dubious operation that the quartet stumble upon that quickly escalates to a hostage situation, the "Are you American? What kind of American are you?" scene that is only hinted at in the trailers. He's crossed over where he doesn't need to know particulars ("Reuters? What's that?") nor does he care to learn. He makes decisions cavalierly and unhesitatingly and doesn't care if he makes a mistake—he'll just bury it. Plemons is so good at playing casually dangerous that the scene crackles with the authenticity of a body-cam and with escalating horror. Yeah, it could happen. It could definitely happen.

If there's a fault to be had, it's of the "Chekhov's Gun" variety—things talked about in the opening become significant in the second and third act as the stakes build. But, one can concede the point that this is veterans talking about the dangers and imparting wisdom to uninitiated. They impart that wisdom in the hope that it doesn't happen. But, it's happened before, so they talk about it, knowing full well that what's happened before...

The movie ends when the particular goals are met and things achieved. But like most Garland movies, it leaves you asking "What Happens Next", although the most typical scenario is discussed—as if by order of Chekhov. But, that is not Civil War's concern. It rack-focuses your mind back to the journalists and what has just transpired because at some point the movie has to end, and one is left contemplating the "Who" and the "What" and the "When" and the "How."

But, never the "Why."

Killers of the Flower Moon

Coyote Ugly: The Curse of the Pierce Arrow

or

The Conformist of the Plains

 

David Grann's output of articles and books has provided fodder for lots of movies: The Lost City of Z, Dark Crimes, The Old Man and The Gun, Trial By Fire, and now Killers of the Flower Moon (with its director, Scorsese's next film to be based on Grann's latest book "The Wager"). Grann wrote his book about a moment of long forgotten history—The Osage Indian Murder Case, what the newspapers at the time called "The Reign of Terror" from 1918 to 1931. It was one of the first murder cases taken over and solved by the nascent Bureau of Investigation, what would soon become acronymed as the FBI, an attempt to coordinate crime data into a national data resource that could be shared amidst the disparate state jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies. 

Grann's book is a fine read—it spent 49 weeks on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list—breaking down the story into three narratives: of Mollie Burkhart (played in the film by Lily Gladstone) of the Osage Tribe, who saw three of her sisters and her mother die (under suspicious or downright murderous circumstances) in a short space of a few years; of Tom White (played in the film by Jesse Plemons), a former Texas Ranger, recruited by the Bureau to investigate the murders—his unique way of assembling a team and having them blend in with the community was a bit unpracticed, but did lead to convictions; and a modern post-investigation appraisal. When Martin Scorsese announced it for his next movie with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio

starring it was originally just going to focus on the FBI investigation with DiCaprio as White.But DiCaprio had other ideas—he wanted to play "a villain" and so the film was re-tooled by Scorsese and Eric Roth to feature more of the role of Ernest Burkhart, husband of Mollie and his role in the web of deceit and murders...all to obtain the headrights (the land mineral rights owned by full-blooded Osage tribe-members) to their oil-rich pocket of Oklahoma, that made the Osage "the wealthiest people per capita" in the nation. The Osage became prosperous with their oil stipend, creating a power dynamic where they ostensibly ran things in Fairfax, Oklahoma, but they were also targets for any scam and flim-flam the other residents could concoct in order to benefit from their prosperity.

And that included marrying into the money, the oldest way for profligate men to get a sustainable nest-egg and not waste it all in a short period of time. If there's children, then there's always inheritance, or better yet, the idealistically labeled "trust-fund," that can be exploited as long as no one is following the trail of money. In Fairfax, Oklahoma, the trail was not only monetary, but one merely had to trace family ties and the obituary column to see that something was surfacing besides oil.

Clocking in at a back-breaking 3 hours 20 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon begins where most Scorsese movies do, following the bad guys. Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) exits the train to Fairfax after serving in the First World War and receives a warm welcome from his uncle, cattleman William Hale (De Niro), who is perfectly agreeable to taking Ernest under his wing, despite his lack of experience. Under an avuncular pretense, Hale gives his nephew the lay of the land, giving him a book on the Osage people ("Do you read?") and asking pointed questions about his taste in women. Hale speaks the Osage language and extends his avuncular charm to express support for the Native land-owners, especially dealing with the white city officials, the police and Sheriff, the local doctors, even the undertaker (that'll come in handy!). He also is quite familiar with the local underworld (even handier!), and his network makes him less than a town father, and more of a puppet-master.

Burkhart is his primary puppet, lending support to a romance between Ernest and Mollie Kyle (Underwood, who in her mandarin understated way, steals the show as well as hearts), who is already seeing signs of poor health in her family, who have a tendency towards diabetes. And when a "specialist" is needed for some special work to be done, Hale uses his nephew as a go-between, the better to keep his immaculate hands clean. 

But, the center cannot hold. In the community, the deaths become less and less isolated and more overt, culminating in a house-bombing that kills Mollie's sister and her husband, who has been asking questions and connecting dots, while resisting any overtures to share information with Ernest. That signs his death warrant and the egregiousness of the crime—the sheer audacity of it—mandates outside help. Private detectives had been hired before...but had disappeared never to be heard from again. A meeting between tribes leaders and President Calvin Coolidge allows Mollie to make an entreaty...and for once, the Great White Father keeps his word.

This is where Plemons' Tom White from the Bureau of Investigation comes into town from Washington, and it only takes a couple of inquiries to determine that he's being stone-walled...by everybody. Evidence goes missing, records disappear, stories are vague and sometimes conflicting. But White brings in some other agents with varying backgrounds to infiltrate the town and integrate themselves into both the White and Native communities. Then, they share information and find the links...and discrepancies. And they attack from within.

If the film has a fault in conception, it is in the sheer repetitiveness of the crimes (although, to be clear, the crimes DID happen as depicted and over that long period of time, which shows how frustratingly slow any shred of justice could be brought to so insular and complicit a community). But, the numbing volume of the crimes strains credulity and patience for an audience, even one used to the slow process of justice and the bull-headedness that passes for politics but stinks like conspiracy. Not to minimize the scope of the crimes, but to see every one of them played out through the machinations of Hale through the prevarifications of DiCaprio's Burkhart makes it a long stretch of the same thing repeated over and over.

Gladstone is the acting highlight of the film, and De Niro—although a bit too long in the tooth to be playing Hale—does a good turn as evil posing as the friendly neighbor.

DiCaprio, though, is an issue. Sure, he's good box-office (and he's an Executive Producer on the film), but it may be time for the long string of Scorsese collaborations to end. At times, one can see him using Brando tricks and an occasional Jack Nicholson strategy in his acting, but mostly he seems to have based his performance on a frowny-face emoji (😠). His face freezes into the same petulant scowl, no matter the circumstances, whether he's unhappy, concerned, frustrated, murderous or cornered. And, the deeper you get into the movie, the lower the corners of his mouth drop until you wonder if his jaw will just drop off once they carve far enough. It's a disappointing performance, considering how integral DiCaprio made himself to the film.

 

It may be time to kick him off the raft, Marty.

As his character is in the film, DiCaprio is the film's weakest link.

Still, Killers of the Flower Moon resonates, as one more early example of a nation's systemic racism hiding in the shadows and swept under the rug, something that, although denied in all corners of the continuing national reckoning, continues to raise its ugly head.

Ernest Burkhart, Mollie Kyle Burkhart (on the right), and William Hale,

The Master

Written at the time of the film's release. As a bit of context, the incident in the first paragraph referred to the 2012 attack on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which was initially blamed on Islamists fired up by a video trailer for a film called Innocence of Muslims, The attack was lately determined to be pre-meditated.

The Master: Scientologist-Baiter
or
"Tom and I Are Still Friends"

One wonders why, if a (laughable) movie trailer was so important to cause bloodshed in the Middle East, The Master isn't causing a ruckus in Los Angeles, the home of Scientology. Perhaps Scientologists have thicker skins (and more tolerance) than radical Islamists, who seem to find any excuse to cause harm at the drop of a Koran, or perhaps it would cause a worrisome spike in the members' auditing, or because—really—it has less to do with Scientology than other issues...like what would draw someone to a situation like Scientology—or any belief system—in the first place.

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film has a similar theme to his previous films—the combustibility of individuals in a collective, and takes a similar tack—get the best individuals in their fields, wind them up and let them go, producing an oblique open-ended vessel into which audiences can pour their interpretations. It's not that Anderson doesn't have anything to say, so much as he'll be damned if he comes right out and says it, and sets up situations that suggest relevancy, waiting for the happy accident that will inform the whole. It's not that there isn't a directorial hand here—there's a reason there are so many close-up's—it's that there's isn't a sure directorial stance.

After useless psychoanalysis, Freddie turns the examination on others.

 

So, you have a lot of surface, the brilliant spot-on "feel" of the production design by Jack Fisk and David Frank, the crisp cinematography of Mihai Malairemare Jr. , the individual performances of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and (especially) Joaquin Phoenix on display, to an amorphous end that challenges, and often begs for, interpretation. Fortunately, the material is strong enough, and Anderson's contextual thesis is rich enough that one can throw all manner of thoughts into the stew, and make one's own meal out of it. 

We first encounter Freddie Quell (Phoenix) in the Navy during the battles in the South Pacific during World War II.* Even there, in the midst of hundreds of young men in close quarters, he's an outsider, a loner connecting with no one except for his one discernible skill-mixing noxious brain-cell killing concoctions out of anything handy. He spends his time isolated, in some form of inebriation, the limits of behavior and humor blurred to indiscernibility, and when he's out of the service, he's immediately transferred to a psych division, where he is examined endlessly to no avail—the doctors are spending all their time trying to find the answer to what's wrong. 

It's all too obvious what's wrong—he's a barely functioning alcoholic obsessed with sex—but there's no cure for a complete lack of self-awareness or perspective, and Quell is released to the world, unchanged and unremorseful, just another problem that can't fixed and so is dispatched out of anyone's responsibility, to let Nature or Darwinism deal with him. He's a perpetual outcast on the edge of functionality, unstable and instinctually acting out. A job as a department store photographer ends up as an ironic choice—he spends his days looking in, trying to document normalcy, while on breaks, he uses his darkroom chemicals to create some bizarre cocktail to fry his brain and ease his isolation, while trying to make time with a store model. 

Phoenix is brilliant in this, a raw nerve and not just mercurial, but mercurial at a high boil. The photography job ends with a violent incident of his own making, and he winds up as a migrant worker where, again, he moonlights with moonshine, and has to go on the lam where he stows away on a boat that has been commandeered for a wedding party.

It's here that he meets Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman in a varied, extravagant performance that feels a bit like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane) self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher. But above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you."
 

"Just like you."

Yes and no. Dodd is the gypsy-evangelist of something called "The Cause," a nebulous philosophy for which he is the architect and messiah. The rules of The Cause change a bit according to need and the whims of Dodd (who erupts in petulant anger when challenged on it, by believers and non- alike) even though the origins of it supposedly date back "trillions of years" (later, his son will tell Quell "he's just making all this up as he goes along").

He's drawn to Quell for his potent concoctions, for his raw contrariness, which Dodd finds a challenge to his self-improvement methods (called "processing"), and because Quell's feral anti-social fury is a reflection of Dodd's free-thinking, but with the irresponsibility that he doesn't have the freedom to practice. Both men are self-medicating outliers, unable or unwilling to fit in—square pegs in the rounded holes of society.

For Quell, Dodd's processing is a tonic, though not as bracing as what he can make himself, a form of questioning self-examination that, instead of making one feel bad about oneself, makes one feel good. And for Quell, seeming to belong for the first time in his life, The Cause feels like home and family.

What color are her eyes?  You decide.

Not all the family is happy, though. Dodd's followers, including his Lady McBeth of a wife (Adams), fear Quell's aggressiveness and unpredictability, she especially questions whether Quell will ever improve and worries about the effect he will have on her husband and their cottage industry. Quell may be the best patient for the very therapy that they espouse, but the danger lies in how much damage he will prove to their house of cards in the process. It's a battle of co-dependents for The Cause, while the two men find the limits to their visions of paradise. There's a lot of room for mis-interpretation here, most especially in Dodd and Quell's scene in which the older man seeks to calm the emotions of both of them by singing, as if it was a lullaby, "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China" which ends with the phrases "All to myself/Alone," emphasizing the isolation of both the Messiah and the acolyte, as they set themselves adrift.

So, in the end, once the credits have rolled up, what does it all mean? What's the point?** I'm honest enough with myself to say I don't have a flippin' clue, except what I've laid out here as themes and observations, but will admit that it is all up there on the screen, ready to be interpreted in as individual a manner as any audience member can provide, which is what makes Anderson (along with Terrence Malick, who is a bit more focused) one of our most enigmatic of filmmakers. Whether that makes him a visionary or a charlatan—like the filmmakers, captains of industry, and religious leaders he portrays, making it up as he goes along—depends on our interpretation, as well. And it is enough for me that he continues on the path he takes—not going for the easy superhero flick, or facile rom-com—without compromising anything...not even his intentions. It makes him brave, admirable...and always watchable. Challenging to be sure, but I like a challenge.

No, really. We're all together in this.

* One of the running motifs of the film is the time spent on ships of some sort, adrift.

** It's been amusing to read film critics struggling with this one, some finally merely knocking over their king to just call it a "character study."  It's a tough one, alright.  But, it is trying to say something about the human condition, even if only to say it has no easy answers, either, not even for those who espouse and specialize in easy answers.  I like that, but one wishes there was more provided by the film-maker, rather than just providing a rorschach test for us to throw our interpretations onto.

The Power of the Dog

Gloves Off

or

"Well, Well...I Wonder What Little Lady Made This?"
 

Jane Campion knows her Westerns. You can tell that with an opening shot of The Power of the Dog, tracking along the windows inside a house, the interior black, but the outside bright with sunlight, focusing on the outsider walking along parallel to the side of the house, but not a part of it, echoing John Ford and echoing The Searchers, but in her own way.

 

Like Ford, she will play with light and shadow in her western, even depending on it for a visual motif that will form a sub-text in the film, and she will pay particular attention to landscapes that separate people and must be conquered if anything resembling civilization is to take root in that wilderness. Ford's westerns were all about that and the land he photographed was itself a character in that/those stories, not merely a back-drop, not location-for-location's sake. 

 

But, that's what she takes from Ford and goes her own, entirely different way, leaving him and the dream of civilization in the dust. For Campion, the world-building of westerns is as much a myth as the westerns themselves. Civilization is about what people decide to agree on, and if the point of rugged individualists is to play by their rules, there won't be much agreement. Or very little civil.

The man in the window is Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, with his brother George (Jesse Plemons) is part of a well-to-do family with a cattle ranch in 1925 Montana. Both brothers—"Romulus and Remus" Phil calls them—are college educated with George knowing the law and Phil the classics of English literature. But, the two couldn't be more different, from each other and their educations. Phil is rough in speech and manner and does most of the work around the ranch, while George is sensitive and does the paper-work. Where Phil is coarse and brutal, George is quiet and empathetic.

They've been working the ranch for a long time, with George leavening the coarseness and conflicts the acerbic Phil causes in whatever he does. At the end of their cattle drive, the crew stops into an inn run by Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) for drinks and chow. They're served by Rose's son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is slight, effeminate, and shy. Peter becomes an easy target for Phil's malice, making fun of everything the boy does, including using the artistic center-pieces that Peter has meticulously created to light his cigarette. Rose breaks down over this and George tries to apologize, since Phil wouldn't think of it, nor would he were it suggested to him.

But, this starts a series of events that drives a wedge between Phil and George, starting with the gentler brother marrying the Gordon woman—Phil considers her (as he says to her face) "a cheap schemer" only after the family money, and once she sells the inn and moves to the Burbank ranch-house, he begins a campaign of intimidation and hostility towards her that drives her to drink—a habit that she had previously disdained. George has paid for Peter to go away to college, but when he comes back, he finds his mother a wreck, and an open hostility against him from the cowboys working the ranch.

Campion breaks with Ford in the portrayal of women as revered stabilizers in the wilds of the West—Rose doesn't have the strength to take command and be the influence that Ford's women are in the isolation of the prairie—and Phil's cunning brute is too entrenched in his "man's world" view to allow any sort of control out of his grasp. The presence of a woman is just too intrusive to his staked-out territory.

But it's more complicated than that. And to say anything more would be to take away some complexities and motivations that might spoil the bumps and shocks that the movie has in store and could ruin its journey for audiences. Let's just say this: Campion has made a Western in locale (and borrowed some tropes from the genre), but she has other influences as well, taken from psychological thrillers and even thrown a shade of Hitchcock, making The Power of the Dog a definite hyphenate. It starts out as one thing—which may make some reconsider if they want to watch something that dark—and eventually changes into something else—something much darker.

But, one cannot parse just how beautiful The Power of the Dog is. Campion, working with cinematographer Ari Wegner, has created images of vistas and landscapes that at times take the breath away, sometimes mimicking iconic shots from previous Westerns, at times taking their cue (as in the shot above) from the paintings of Frederic Remington—as previous directors had done. Sometimes you just want to hold on an image before it inevitably movies on, wondering at how it managed to be lit by a single match, or how it captures the troubling disquiet of twilight.

It's a good watch, that will inspire questions and cast a refraction on past examples of the Western—whether the winning of the West wasn't as much a loss, and whether in bringing European culture to the frontier, we didn't drag along something horrible in the process, something that only seemed tame, in our taming of the frontier.