n a recent interview with GQ, Kirsten Dunst talked about embracing aging and other physiognomic “defects” — a mindset partly borne of early-career support from longtime collaborator Sofia Coppola, who encouraged her at an impressionable age to, for instance, keep the natural teeth Hollywood types advised her to straighten out. “I still know to this day, I’m not gonna screw up my face and look like a freak,” Dunst said. “You know what I mean? I’d rather get old and do good roles.”
In Civil War, Dunst’s natural weathering proves an asset — something cinematographer Rob Hardy often studies in close-up and which often feels like a manifestation of the movie’s overarching weariness. The film, writer-director Alex Garland’s first since the embarrassing Men (2022), is set in the near future, amid the third term of a dictatorial president (played by a silver-haired Nick Offerman) whose leadership has splintered the U.S. into distinct factions guided by ideological principles never made that clear: the Republic of California, the Western Forces, the Second Republic of Texas, the Florida Alliance, and the Loyalist States.
Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist whose career began around the same time he was first elected. She rose to fame for unflinchingly chronicling what’s offhandedly referred to as “the Antifa massacre”; she’s continued racking up cred since then for daring to capture scenes from which others would prefer to look away: a man trapped by a gas-drenched tire set aflame, mangled bodies strewn about a city street immediately following a suicide bombing she’s barely dodged. “We record so other people ask,” she replies firmly when someone wonders why she avoids intervention.
Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Cailee Spaeny in Civil War. All Civil War imagery courtesy of A24.
Civil War begins in the days leading up to what could be a turning point for the country. It’s late summer, and it’s expected that on the Fourth of July the nation’s dissenting, assassination-minded factions will storm the U.S. Capitol. Lee and her journalist coworker, Joel (Wagner Moura), are planning a detour-heavy, perilous trip from New York City to Washington, D.C., so that they can publish what could likely be the president’s last interview. Never mind that he hasn’t given the press any firsthand access in more than a year, or that D.C. has become so dangerous for journalists that wearing a press badge is less a deterrent than an invitation for harm.
In their banged-up white van, Lee and Joel reluctantly take along Sammy (an always-wonderful Stephen McKinley Henderson), a living legend still working for “what’s left of the New York Times,” and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a photojournalist in her early 20s who’s so green that she better knows who she’d like to be (“Oh, fuck, you’re Lee Smith!” she exclaims when the latter introduces herself during a protest) than what she’s capable of. Civil War’s ensemble has persuasive chemistry, their survivalist closeness sore with fear and varying levels of cynicism. Dunst and Spaeny, both excellent, in particular have a touchy, convincing mother-daughter-like rapport that takes time to defrost. The Henderson character notes how Lee’s hardness on her unwanted quasi-protégé feels not dissimilar from her picking on a younger version of herself, who wasn’t all that different than she’d like to remember.
The winding journey is nightmarish — there’s a run-in with a gun-happy patriot type wearing ICEE-red sunglasses played by Jesse Plemons, a pit stop covering a shootout between members of enemy factions in an abandoned cluster of buildings — and superficially compelling because of our curiosity about the minutiae of the speculative fictions Civil War spins. The economy is so bad that a sandwich, in certain parts of the U.S., could cost you $300. If you live rurally enough, it’s possible to be completely untouched by the horrors going on elsewhere. The president is now prone to drone-striking civilians. He’s also disbanded the FBI.
Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny in Civil War.
Civil War is fascinating until you start to notice how little it’s saying beyond teasing what’s gone wrong in its parallel universe — a smorgasbord of worst-case scenarios only lightly picked through. It can be called an anti-war movie, though tacitly declaring that “war is bad,” along with other agreed-upon evils like xenophobia, is about where Garland’s ideas begin and end. He’s more forward in his portrayal of the predation inherent in journalism, though his healthy ambivalence is only rudimentarily explored, and also turned questionable by his use of real-life footage recorded by right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo and his thanking in the credits of the writer Helen Lewis, who’s been criticized for her transphobia.
The central idea of Men — that the eponymous gender is wicked by nature and not because of social conditioning — was obtuse, but it was at least capable of inciting a strong reaction. Civil War is so devoid of ideas that Garland must have counted stating the obvious as one. It’s more entertaining than Men, but you also long for Men’s willingness to say something and potentially falter. There had been some pre-release concerns about Civil War’s release coinciding with a particularly fraught election year; the movie’s ideological apprehensiveness ultimately makes it feel surprisingly untethered to any particular time, allusions to the present only notional.
Civil War works best on a visceral level. All its close-call scenes can turn your blood cold; the cacophonous music by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow hastens the cooling process. Resembling an action sequence in a Kathryn Bigelow movie, the extended finale is a pulse-pounding thrill; it’s hard to resist the simple pleasure of seeing the White House portrayed as a treacherous breeding ground for the world’s wrongs, even if that depiction is neutered by several bizarro-world qualifiers. Where Civil War leads, though, has the deflating quality of an anticlimax — the feeling of a promise that mostly just echoes emptily once fulfilled.
Ilinca Manolache in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Courtesy of 4 Proof Film.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude’s follow-up to 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, is the kind of comedy that as much makes you laugh as want to promptly curl up and die. Preoccupied, among many other things, with the slow soul-crush of living to work, its first section follows a fed-up cog for a multinational corporation, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), who drives exhaustedly around Bucharest for hours and hours to film various people who might, or might not, be featured in a video for the company about workplace safety. (She turns her music up loud in order to stay awake for this job that often requires she work between 16 and 20 hours a day; to blow off steam, she makes increasingly viewed, and obnoxiously offensive, TikToks she claims satirize the types of loud-mouthed incel types who worship men like Andrew Tate.) The second section focuses on the man eventually chosen to be featured in the video, which, though ostensibly meant to make the corporation look like it cares about ensuring employee safety, only underscores how bad working conditions are. (The worker’s injuries could have been avoided if there had been better lighting and guard rails at the factory where he once worked.) The ex-employee is actually in the process of suing the company for wrongdoing; he’s only agreed to participate in the video because his family desperately needs the money.
The nearly three-hour-long Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’s concerns — worker exploitation, corporate greed, the mainstreaming of über-misogynistic talking points — are serious, but its approach is formally and tonally playful. Scenes, shot in grainy black and white, are interspersed with Angela’s TikToks as we would see them on our phones, and also clips from a 1980s romantic drama about a woman cab driver looking for love (the protagonist of the latter herself ends up actually appearing, in a pivotal role, in End of the World). The film features narrative stunts like a visit with the infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll and is probably comedically sharpest when sending up the disingenuousness of corporate care whether related to safety or inclusion. (Its emblem is a cold-staring CEO played by Nina Hoss who is a relative of Goethe.) The movie has often been compared to the films of the tirelessly experimental Jean-Luc Godard, with its presentational inventiveness and its enthusiastic intermingling of high and low culture. In a post-Parasite (2019) era of moviemaking hungry for eat–the–rich narratives, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is the best of the crop I’ve seen — the smartest, subtlest, and hardest to forget.
Peterson Reviews 