McDaniel
“We record so other people ask. Wanna be a journalist? That’s the job.”
Veteran photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) sees the hanging bodies as a teaching moment for rattled newbie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). She’s crying, trying to understand the horrors she has seen. But if you pause to ask questions, you miss the shot.
Director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is a reminder of just how vital the journalist’s role is in showing people what’s going on in the world.
In this film, the United States has split into separate regions, with the Texas and California-led Western Forces fighting to overthrow an authoritarian government led by a president serving a third term.
A small team of journalists are making the cross-country trip to Washington, D.C. to try and get an interview with the president of the crumbling nation — a man who hasn’t given an interview in more than a year.
Like good journalism, “Civil War” doesn’t show a bias toward any side — it is only interested in what’s happening and letting the audience ask the questions.
Along the way, the team embed themselves with troops to photograph battles, and it’s in these moments that the simplistic chaos of war is in their sights.The political reasons for why the fighting is taking place no longer matters. This is exemplified by an interaction that takes place when they come across a sniper duel.
“No one is giving us orders, man,” says the sniper’s spotter. “Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.”
The film steadily builds tension before the team’s arrival at the White House. Like the haunting photos the team captures, the film’s cinematography puts the same sort of thought into how it frames its shots, giving memorable perspectives of a world falling apart.
I’ve never thought about the rule of thirds on an execution shot.
In the thick of it, shoulder to shoulder with soldiers, the journalists lean in and out of cover, armed not with guns, but cameras. Shooting to inform, not to kill.
This is my favorite role I’ve ever seen Kirsten Dunst in, as the tired and tormented media veteran Lee, her cold eyes holding back a sadness from exploding outward from the years of awful things she has captured.
Her colleague, Joel (Wagner Moura from “Narcos”) provides a contrasting energy early, as the happy-go-lucky type who can put on a masked smile to hide his trauma, until it becomes too much.
But it’s Spaeny (“Priscilla”) in the role of Jessie who steals every scene she’s in, trying to balance her hunger for those same experiences with frequent terror.
“I’ve never been that scared before, and I’ve never felt more alive,” she tells them.
And understandably so. Throughout history, citizens have hunted down world leaders, sometimes ending with a photo of armed men smiling over a prominent dead body — like a hunter posing over a deer. Seeing that hunt in a fictional America is quite jarring.
And it takes a special person to take that difficult picture for the rest of us to see.
5/5
Scott McDaniel is an assistant professor of journalism at Franklin College. He lives in Bargersville with his wife and three kids.
