civil war (w&d alex garland)

Many years ago, in the throes of marital breakdown, I took a very cheap holiday on a Greek island and wrote a screenplay called Truck. It wasn’t a Leonard Cohen type of Greek island. The best friends I made were a hairdresser and her mum from the Midlands, who sipped retsina with me a couple of times. It felt like the end of the world, the death of civilisation. I have no doubt that it helped enormously in the writing of Truck, a film about the end of civilisation which would never be made in a world which has, so far, steadfastly refused to end.

I imagine that if Garland  went to an Island to write Civil War, his budget would have been rather more generous than mine was and his stay more luxurious. Like Truck, Civil War is a road movie, set against the backdrop of society in meltdown. Garland’s dystopian vision seems as valid today as it would have been back in the Nixon times of Hunter S, and in a way Garland might be the closest we’ve got to a sanitised gonzo scribe. The film revolves around a group of photo-journalists who will document the conflict, and it has as much to do with war journalism, the Tim Hetheringtons of this world, as it has to do with politics. The excellent Kirsten Dunst is called Lee, a subtle reference which the film unsubtly underlines early on. Dunst gives a great, vulnerable performance, adding emotional depth to the shock fireworks. War journalists are a curious, seemingly apolitical breed, servants to ‘the story’ and their neutral role reflects Garland’s neutral take on the politics which are always implicit rather than explicit, in spite of the potential topicality. The journalists’ importance, (as the IDF are well aware in Gaza, where they have not been allowed in), is paramount. They are the witnesses, the ones who lend the tree falling in the forest its redeemable value. Wars without journalists are nothing more than killing zones.

Civil War is a very well made film with a taught script and enough jump scares and shocks to keep the popcorn audience happy. At the same time it feels like a far cry from that breed of seventies political US filmmaking (All The President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, Missing, even The Conversation), which somehow managed to feel so edgy and unsettling. The gonzo stalks the stage, but his/her madness is restricted to serviceable and effective story beats. This is probably not in any way down to Garland, as maverick a mainstream filmmaker as we have right now : it’s just the law of the regulated (free) market.