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."

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) I remember reading Anne Rice's novel of "Interview with a Vampire" many, many years ago and found it a dispiriting read. In fact, by the time I got around to watching the film, everything about the story had evaporated into the ether, like one of her vampires sun-bathing. I do remember the controversy of Tom Cruise being cast as vampire-manipulator Lestat and that there was much consternation about it. My viewing of it made me think that Cruise was the best thing about it, one of his very few performances where he stretched as an actor and a personality. The rest of it, if you'll pardon the pun, sucked.

Certainly, director Neil Jordan isn't to blame. His direction and general look for the film is exemplary, giving the film an elegant if decaying look—after all, vampires are immortal, so why would they be concerned with daily chores (plus vampirism is 180° from Godliness). Casting is fine (even if some of the acting isn't), and Jordan even throws in a couple of touches of the surreal, if only for the sheer creepiness the effect has.

Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) is in a nondescript San Francisco apartment, waiting for his interview subject to arrive. Surely it will be an evening interview, as he is Louis de Pointe Du Lac (Brad Pitt), who is supposedly a vampire. Skeptical, Molloy quizzes him about the various vampire tropes, which he dismisses, the legends he says coming from "a demented Irishman". But, the coffins, yes.

Then, he tells his story—of how, in 1791, despite wealth and property in Louisiana, he falls into self-destructive depression when his wife dies during childbirth. During a drunken night, he is followed by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Cruise) and after being attacked by him, is offered to be killed and turned into a vampire, "giving you the choice that I never had." The two become constant companions of the night-world, never again seeing the sun (in a neat little bit, Louis becomes obsessed with the sun, even going to see Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans directed by F.W. Murnau, who, more famously, also directed Nosferatu, the first vampire movie).

But, the two have decidedly different ideologies of life...or after-life. Lestat is a libertine with no moral code, taking his victims at his pleasure, perhaps in vengeful bitterness for the way that he was turned without having any choice in the matter. Louis is appalled by this and regrets the taking of human life and would rather feed on animals, which is something that Lestat constantly mocks. He does make one exception. When a plague decimates the country-side, Louis finds a child (Kirsten Dunst) whose mother has died of the disease and turns her, giving her immortal life. For him, this creates a sort of ersatz family. For the child, Claudia, it gives her immortality, but traps her forever in the body of a child. She may mature, growing older and wiser in her mind, but will remain at the age in which she is killed.

The novel and film have become favorites in the LGBTQ community for its metaphorical take on hidden societies and non-traditional families, and one can see that point of view. One rebels, though, that the metaphor is ensconced in such an anti-life trapping. These vampires are murderers, and even Louis, squeamish as he may be at homicide, loses his moral ambiguities when it suits his purposes. They seem more like a cult to me than a healthy representational metaphor. Your moral mileage may vary.

And, these vampires are also incredible narcissists. Everyone is selfish to a degree, but these nether-folk would be death at a party, fixating on themselves, bloviating their philosophies and negatively-lighted world-view and looking upon the lighted world as merely a buffet to exploit. Given the era in which it's set, one would half-expect them to become imperialist and invade other countries.

But, what leaves me as cold as a corpse about Interview with a Vampire is Brad Pitt's performance as Louis. Granted, that he was only a couple of years from his true break-out roles and was still finding his way to matter as more than a pretty face. But, his Louis is such an opaque presence that he seems at sea most of the time, not able to make depression, self-destruction, or even drunkenness very interesting. He internalizes so much as to make any emotion he's trying to convey invisible to the naked eye. He's turned into a phenomenal talent as actor. But, at this point, he wasn't.

And while I'm no fan of Tom Cruise, one has to give kudos to his Lestat, as grandiose and theatrical a performance as he's ever given. Sure, he can go too far in movies, but, his Lestat is such an unmitigated purveyor of debauchery (and loving it) that Cruise could never really go too far "out there" and not have it seem uncharacteristic. His Lestat simply wouldn't care, and it makes it one of Cruise's best works, horrific as it is.

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.

The Beguiled (2017)

Some Real Southern Hospitality
or
"Seems Having the Soldier Here is Having an Effect"

One can't mention Sofia Coppola's film of The Beguiled without saying that it is a remake of the 1971 collaboration between Clint Eastwood and his favorite director Don Siegel—the film credits the source novel by Thomas Cullinan (originally called "The Painted Devil"), but also the original's screenplay by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp (both written under psuedonyms). It is one of the few box-office failures of Eastwood's career, but it is one of his favorites as it was Don Siegel's opinion that it was the best film he had directed. Universal Studios' handling of the film's marketing caused a rift between them and their star, which led to him leaving Universal for Warner Brothers, and one can only speculate why it did so poorly. Eastwood was Universal's biggest stars at the time and it was thought because the film was marketed as a typical Eastwood action film that it didn't succeed, being decidedly different in scope and purpose, and because Eastwood spends so much of the film laid-up from a war injury. Whatever the reason, The Beguiled is well-regarded as an atypical Eastwood film by both fans of the star and Siegel. That it also features a great performance by the legendary Geraldine Page doesn't hurt, either.

If it is so well-regarded, why the hell re-make it? Good question. The story, about a wounded Union soldier who is found and harbored by a Southern Seminary for young women, hasn't changed. It is still quite solidly in the Southern Gothic tradition. But, times have changed, and with it, the angle that Coppola approaches the story from.

It's a bucolic Virginia morning as Amy (Oona Lawrence), a young student of Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Women, goes about her morning duties, picking berries, mushrooms, communing with nature. What she doesn't expect is that she'd come across Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Union soldier of the 66th out of New York, splayed out under a tree, suffering from a nasty bullet wound to the leg. She's curious, a bit wary, but her instinct is to take him back to the seminary. "do you want to go back (to the Army)?" she asks him, as he leans on her for support. "Maybe," he says in a thick Irish brogue "when me leg stops bleeding."

The women are in the middle of a sewing lesson when he's collapsed onto the path before the front entryway. His wound is checked and it's bad. McBurney has just enough presence to say "I am grateful to be your prisoner" before he passes out. The head of the seminary, Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) gives instructions to the girls to lift him into the house to the parlor on the first floor. There, while the other girls gather like sparrows outside the locked door, she cleans his leg and stitches the wound, which is a bloody mess.

Miss Farnsworth's first instinct is to alert the Union soldiers who occasionally pass by, putting a blue rag on the fence that separates the seminary from the road out front. She is persuaded by the girls not to do so, at least until his leg is healed. To this, she agrees, but only for a limited time. When McBurney becomes conscious, he tells her that he deserted the battlefield after becoming wounded, and was only there because he'd accepted $300 to take another man's place in the Union army. He acquiesces to Miss Farnsworth's plans to send him away, but it's quite clear he doesn't want to go back into the service. Her loyalties become confused when a pair of Southern soldiers come to the house for food, and no word is mentioned about their unexpected guest.

The girls of the school become quite taken with Corporal McBurney, finding any excuse to be close by when anyone enters the room in order to sneak a peak at the soldier. Amy feels closest to him and protective as she's the one who found him. But, it is Miss Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), who has the deepest feelings for him. For his part, McBurney, fearing that he could be turned over to the Rebel soldiers at any time, tries to gain as many allies as possible in the house, concentrating on Miss Farnsworth, who has the most to lose by keeping him there, and Edwina, to whom he professes great affection. But, he is in the thoughts of all of the girls, and relations inside the house become strained with similar, if differing agendas. During evening prayers, one of the girls (Elle Fanning) sneaks to his room to give the Colonel a long, lingering kiss good-night.

When McBurney is recovered enough to be able to amble about with the use of a cane, Miss Farnsworth and the girls decide to throw him a dinner, show him "some real Southern hospitality." A well-intentioned idea on the whole, but in the particular, all of the girls try to out-do each other in impressing the Colonel, wearing their finest clothes and jewelry and trying one-up each other by telling him who made what in the dinner.

The evening ends with music and McBurney is treated to a performance by all the women, each of whom appraise him with their own thoughts—he must think he's in the luckiest position he could be in, but he is still a prisoner, and is probably losing that realization.

"...similar, if differing agendas"

As his strength grows, he starts to make a case with Miss Farnsworth that he could be useful as a groundskeeper, and begins to clear brush, trim trees, and generally tend to work that has been neglected during the war. All the time, he continues to make advances on Edwina, while not betraying anything but trustworthiness to Miss Farnsworth, who starts to see McBurney as a needed presence.

This can't come to any good, and with so much temptation, and a misguided idea that he might be gaining favor and some control over the situation, McBurney makes an error in judgement that further cripples him and causes the situation at the seminary to deteriorate at a rapid pace. He fails to realize that he is at the school's mercy. And the quality of mercy in times of war can be quite strained.

Coppola's direction is austere—far more austere and far less heated than Siegel's direction of the previous version. Siegel brought a quality of guignol and even a bit of horror to his version, while Coppola's is all surface gentility, betraying good manners that are always presented up-front, while their opposite simmers underneath. It is most interesting that, given the time interval between the versions, that Coppola's adaptation is not afraid to present that veneer of civility practically all of the way through—she is very much on the girls' side (and although one can hardly say that Siegel's film is on the side of McBurney, we are much more privy to the Eastwood's versions private reactions than we are to Farrell's, who only betrays any duplicity in times of desperation. Eastwood's corporal was a smiling fox, while Farrell is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Coppola isn't afraid to show the fractured relationship of the girls, without a hint of judgment or condemnation that they might work against each other for their own ends. Each one sees a different side of McBurney, the one he wishes them to see, and that they act on instinct and are all individuals makes it a bit more understandable, empowering, but hardly feminist.

All's fair in love and war, Coppola's version of The Beguiled brings that home in one dark combination of both.