CIVIL WAR**** Frightening

CIVIL WAR IS a viscerally exciting movie. Its cine verity style plunges you into the heart of the action, much of which is both heart-stopping and, seemingly clipped from news flashes and war documentaries, feels very real. (Cinematographer Rob Hardy pulls us directly into the action) Kristin Dunst is Lee, an immensely credible war-hardened, “get the shot” photo-journalist whose point of view becomes our point of view through the story. The movie basically follows the journey of four journalist, Dunst and her writer, Joel (Wagner Moura) along with a fellow battle-hardened journalist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a naïve, often scared photographer who, in awe of Lee, tags along, literally for the ride. The four of them are headed to Washington, where Joel wants to get a quote from the embattled president (Nick Offerman).

The movie steers clear from taking sides politically and -seemingly- offering up any overt commentary about the US situation today. We view the unfolding carnage, chaos and societal collapse (by the maestro of societal collapse, writer director Alex Garland of Ex Machina and 28 Days Later) through the dispassionate lens of the observing journalists. There are no interjected conversations about what political or economic actions caused this collapse and civil war; the journalists are the observers, the recorders for posterity. 

They observe a lot. They are at the centre of an unfolding catastrophe where there is one group – the Western front – aligned with another group against a third or fourth groups. What values or beliefs these opposing groups stand for are irrelevant. What matters is that they’re killing each other, with that one group that our protagonists are following, heading toward their big prize, the president of the USA.

We do know one fact: that the president is or has become a dictator and is a likened with various European dictators. It also becomes clear that the act of observation is as destructive, in its own way, as any bullet. For all her tough exterior, Lee is plagued by her history of observations – of brutal killings, of people set on fire, of bombs and destruction. There’s a point when the protective armour of the adrenaline junkie spirit (which they all wear) becomes weakened by such a constant bombardment of the simple act of seeing; and, through photography, remembering. Getting to the truth is dangerous business. Lee’s point comes when she finds herself in a bizarre dress boutique with Jessie (the young photographer). They’re in a town that is seemingly outside the conflagration around it; Lee is persuaded to try on a dress and smile for Jessie’s observing camera. It captures both her shy smile and a glimpse of a life before the collapse. It feels like the moment when Lee changes and the baton of the dispassionate observer passes to the younger photographer. We know one day her breaking point will also come.

But the suggestion is that such intensity of observation takes its toll not simply because of the brutalities seared into the brain but because the core truths that emerge become profoundly destabilising. And this is at the heart of the movie’s, of Garland’s point of view. In one scene the four journalists find themselves witness to a terrible event. A group of men, maybe aligned to one of the groups, or more than likely just roving armed vigilantes, are emptying a dump-truck of its load – dead, bloodied bodies – into a vast open grave. The men confront them, and in an attempt to mollify them, Joel reassures them that he’s a fellow American, just like them. In the response that follows lies the gist of the movie; “But what type of American are you?” asks one of the vigilantes. Because at the heart of the civil war, of America’s actual on-going internal civil war, is the question of identity. Once, Whitman’s boast about America, that “I am large I contain multitudes” was enough of a statement of identity: American as the wide, open, generous land of welcome. Now, the movie suggests, the idea of America has become reduced, shrunken to parochial identities of race and political tribes. The destruction the journalists observe is not so much that of a country, but of its governing idea.

And that -observed- truth; the observed reality of a country, ideologically self-destroying, is truly frightening.

CIVIL WAR: Dir/writer: Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 28 Days Later). With: Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Oferman. Cinematographer:  Rob Hardy (Mission Impossible: Fallout. Ex-Machina)

PRISCILLA*** Return to Sender

SOPHIA COPPOLA IS a director whose style (and success) lies to a large extent in her intensely visual literacy. She’s a goddess of semiotics…each image laden with symbolism and meaning. In Priscilla, her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) for instance is a giant of a man, towering like a Colossus over the petit, doll-like stature of his child paramour, Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny, who looks perfect for the part as the adult child).

It’s an image that immediately communicates -without the need for words – the absolute inequality of their relationship. She the child, he the adult; except that he really isn’t the adult. He’s just the image of one. Adults are few and far between in the movie…Priscilla’s stern parents are the only grown-ups in this infantalised world. For Elvis is as much a child as she is, happy frolicking with his gang of acolytes and soaking up the adoration of his besotted fans. The big difference is that she’s the child with nothing; he’s the child with power, money and fame.

Their relationship is bizarrely asexual, like pre-puberty children, romping in the bed. His seduction of her – so effortless, this fan in awe of her teen matinee idol – is not about sexual conquest. It’s about his need to sculpt an idealised version of his image of an abstract idea of ‘the perfect woman’. Image is all: he arranges her face to suit this idealisation, chooses her clothes, establishes clearly the parameters of their relationship. She – this unreal, created Priscilla – is the chaste stay-at-home virgin, possessed of everything he thinks a girl could possible desire, except desire itself: big house, small dog, shiny new car, couture that makes her small sixteen year-old frame look like a fifty year-old’s. She’s both his child and his mother…neither sexually desirable.

The clothes, the environment of the home, the trappings, the hairstyles are all image perfect. These are the semiotics of entrapment. And beneath these symbols of his fantasies, his child-like simulacrum of love and marriage lies the (even) darker reality of drugs, deception and the Deus ex machina of the Colonel calling the shots.

It’s very clever. And emotionally sterile.

On the one hand, Coppola has brilliantly laid out her case of Priscilla: the girl imprisoned in her gilded cage. We know that at some stage the girl in the grown-up clothes must age into the clothes themselves. But the movie doesn’t carry us emotionally there. For Priscilla’s internal emotional life, there’s an emptiness, a vacuum. We know she’s depressed and repressed because we’re shown her sad and then happy and then depressed etc. But the emotional arc that the story needs; that felt life that must pull her into her into our zone of empathy is absent. Coppola seems to have depended to such an extent on music and imagery that the whole enterprise, lacking an actor who can convey inner feeling, seems to live only on the surface. The result is a short movie (by these days’ standards) that feels longer than it is.

She should have taken one look at the dull script and then ordered her assistant to…return to sender. Oops she wrote it too.

PRISCILLA. Writer (from the book by Priscilla Presley) and director: Sophia Coppola. With: Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn). Cinematographer: Philippe Le Sourd. Costume Designer: Stacey Battat (Still Alice). Composer: Phoenix