A Movie Called 'Civil War' Shouldn’t Avoid Politics This MuchAlex Garland’s film follows a dispiriting Hollywood trend, never really exploring our nation’s prominent fault lines
At last, Texas and California agree on something. In Civil War, the lower 48’s biggest states are a two-pronged secessionist alliance marching on fascist Washington. They are the good guys. The President dissolved the FBI, air-struck his own citizens, and now delusionally promises glorious victory. Another character compares besieged D.C. to 1945 Berlin. If our capital city has become like Germany at the end of World War II, that makes the President . . . well, someone you ideally don’t want your President compared to. Civil War is a solid thriller. Kirsten Dunst gives great dead-eyed exhaustion as a legendary photographer in a crew of reporters driving through our ruined country. Writer-director Alex Garland constructs darkly funny vignettes of devastation: A helicopter crashed at J.C. Penney’s, armed militants in Aloha shirts. But this movie about journalists never answers basic questions. Garland doesn’t define his conflict’s particulars. The warfare onscreen only vaguely connects to our own perma-turmoil. Eight years after the 2016 election, Civil War is another missed chance to reveal the volcanic new realities of American life. Imagine a film about the first Civil War that only mentions slavery once. Conventional wisdom says nobody wants movie people to discuss politics. The two candidates in the last presidential election received 81 million and 74 million votes, vast constituencies no corporation would alienate. That may be why cultural pulse-finder Dwayne Johnson recently promised to “keep my politics to myself.” Good luck sitting on that fence. History offers plenty of successful counter-examples. All the President’s Men hit four years after the Watergate break-in. Oliver Stone spent decades sensationalizing national nightmares. Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper were high-earning controversy magnets filming ultra-recent disputed history. When Spike Lee ended 2018’s BlackkKlansman with footage from the previous summer in Charlottesville, he got an Oscar and the second biggest hit of his career. The buzz for Civil War suggested a desire for cinema that dangerous. If it’s a success, further explorations will follow. But it’s another shallow read on our modern moment. On the big screen, the (first?) Trump administration was only ever a looming shadow on the horizon. Period pieces like Judas and the Black Messiah, Jojo Rabbit and The Post were charged with revisionist fervor, approaching vital concerns in the past tense. Deep reads uncovered political nudges in superhero adventures. You got used to hide-and-seek topicality. Ryan Gosling’s Ken is (sort of) a men’s rights bro; Paul Dano’s Riddler is (sort of) QAnon plus Antifa; Don’t Look Up made Meryl Streep into President She-Donald. (Some TV shows have tried in-the-moment responses to our era’s uncertainties: Roseanne and American Horror Story made identical Jill Stein jokes, ABC held back a Trump-themed Black-ish episode for years and The Good Fight tracked #Resistance-adjacent rich-liberal chaos on something called CBS All Access.) The movies’ preference for allegory and subtext is starting to feel like a retreat. I’m waiting for filmmakers to dramatize our confounding present directly. A Donald Trump biopic will happen someday. (Nobody wants to play Joe Biden, which is either his greatest failing or his secret strength.) A generation of protests, uprisings, reckonings and one attempted coup (so far) offers vast cinematic possibility. The result doesn’t have to be eat-your-vegetables bland. Queen & Slim (2019) brazenly filtered police brutality horror into a stylish renegade romance. It wasn’t subtle, but these are not subtle times. Like, a Viking Shaman invaded the Capitol, y’know? Creatives lean liberal, so left-wing concerns have been centered more than right. There are exceptions, like MAGA-hatted Delroy Lindo breathing fire in 2020’s Da 5 Bloods. In both directions, I sense kid gloves applied to serious material. Last year’s Reality barely dug into the motivations of a true-life intelligence leaker. The Hunt (also released in 2020) turned both political extremes into caricatures, a hit-or-miss satirical approach which still made it the subject of an angry presidential tweet. These are tense subjects for storytellers. Nobody wants to get canceled or doxxed. There’s this new notion that any creative project is a moral platform, which means even portraying a belief system as bad somehow spreads its message. That’s silly, because this thing called the internet lets humans spread Literally Every Idea. But I also wonder if Trump’s election left an unexplored mark on Hollywood’s psyche. He was partly a showbiz creation, the only commander-in-chief whose TV show debuted a half-hour after Friends. His victory proved the power of entertainment celebrity. Imagine two parallel reactions, guilt and awe. What did we do? and Look what we can do! More than anything else, I think that explains the preachiness settling over mainstream movies, the unwillingness to dig deep into controversies the average citizen experiences daily. But great movies are not arguments. They’re collisions, clashing opposing forces against each other for dramatic, comedic, tragic or shocking effect.  That’s why the best scene in Civil War is also its big trailer moment: Jesse Plemons in pink sunglasses, waving a big gun, asking rather pointedly, “What kind of American are you?” It’s a great performance and resonant stunt-casting: Who cares about our broken country, this damn war split the Dunst family! But the scene stands out for an uncomfortable reason. It’s the one time a character vividly represents a specific belief system. The man is — in no uncertain terms — a nationalist and a racist. It’s as if Garland could only allow one single rupture of toxic ideology. Elsewhere the dynamic is overly familiar, the likable lead characters all diverse media types, the most loathsome one-scene personalities mostly violent white idiots. That’s a statement unto itself, and this gun-hating media type certainly appreciates the fan service. In real life, both sides of our Great Divide are diverse coalitions torn with internal strife. Civil War’s imprecise chaos feels like a cheat, or a way to explain America with a very stylish shrug. An apolitical stance is a political stance, though. Vagueness has unintended consequences. Recall that one of the most famous contemporary Republicans has already been the subject of a biopic helmed by a major director, featuring a starry cast and produced by the last decade’s most powerful motion picture company. Admittedly, no one making 2020’s infamously awful Hillbilly Elegy knew they were filming the origin story for Ohio’s current junior Senator. In adapting J. D. Vance’s popular memoir, I believe Ron Howard thought he was portraying one exceptional young man’s rise, without ever wondering what his movie’s hero was rising towards. The next step is obvious: Netflix must greenlight Hillbilly Elegy 2 and track the very 2020s story of an anti-Trump writer evolving into an election-denying MAGA booster. We need a new lead actor old enough to play Senator Vance. Is Jesse Plemons available? Darren Franich is a movie critic who writes The Draftland Scene.
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