It is, perhaps, fitting that director Alex Garland found a horror story to tell with journalists at the heart of it in his latest film.
Largely viewed as an inconvenience and/or nuisance in an increasingly distrusting world by both civilians and the powerful – the most ‘honest’ journalists have found themselves between a rock and a hard place in the last decade or so. The wages have been stagnant for two decades at least, even as alternative sources of revenue dry up for most publications, which has caused many a gifted reporter, editor to trade their idealism to the highest bidder.
The ‘passion’ seems to be on its last legs. While the profession has never been particularly lucrative, today might still be one of the worst times to enter the profession, especially given how it’s viewed by many as an indulgence. “Why am I paying money to be given bad news that isn’t directly affecting me?” is a popular rhetoric one hears in parties across Delhi and Mumbai to the posh parts of London and New York.
So, it makes complete sense that Garland’s film opens and stays with a group of journalists trying to archive a (not too distant) dystopian future in America – where things have spiralled into a second civil war.
On the surface, Garland’s film looks like a Gerard Butler action blockbuster – but the treatment is anything but stylish. There are no ‘enemy countries’ here, we are our own villains. There’s a stray mention of a US president being in his third term – illegal, according to the US constitution. As someone bracing myself for a possible third consecutive win for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the upcoming 2024 elections, I found myself unnerved by this piece of information.
Civil War reminded me of Mathew Heineman’s A Private War (2018) – a film where Rosamund Pike played real-life war correspondent Marie Colvin. While Heineman’s film was one person’s account of the mindlessness of war and their determination to cover it at significant personal risk, Garland’s film throws us into the mix of extreme anarchy – where protesters clash with batons of the National Guard, suicide bombers sprint through barricades, photographers get smacked in the face if they’re too close to the violence.
To Garland’s credit – he drops us into the middle of this chaos without a warning. We’re never told anything about how the war began. How many secessionist forces are trying to take down the US president? Why did some parts of the civilians form their militia to take on the armed forces? Who is fighting who exactly? To paraphrase Bob Dylan: the answers, my friend, have been blown to smithereens. No one knows, and if Garland’s film is to be believed, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone is trying to kill the other, as journalists make sense of what, why, how.
The central bunch is made up of Lee (Kirsten Dunst) – a highly decorated conflict-zone photographer. She’s accompanying the always impressively unpredictable Wagner Moura, playing Joel, a reporter who feeds off the adrenaline of being in a war zone. Stephen Mckinley Henderson plays Sammy, a veteran reporter, who doesn’t let his physical limitations get in the way of his eternal quest for the truth. And the last among them is Cailey Spaeny, playing Jessie, a young photographer who idolises Lee, and is trying to make her first professional dent.
In many ways, this group stands for the various quarters of American journalism. While Lee and Joel seem to have spent a lifetime on the road, Sammy represents someone who has spent an entire career in an air-conditioned high rise, primarily getting his news from the likes of Lee and Joel. Jessie represents the new media outlets – who might lack experience or sophistication of ‘old media’, but are still driven by a good amount of vigour and right intentions.
A thing I cherished the most about Garland’s film is how it makes the distinction between the opportunism of journalists and their innate need to do the right thing. Journalists aren’t sacrificial angels, they do get their fair share of adrenaline by pursuing the truth, but it’s also their quest to record the present that can often become a definitive document for the future.
“Our job is not to care for the people in front of us. Our job is to record it, and hope someone else will care about it,” Lee tells Jessie in one scene, knowing that journalists painted as reckless thrill-seekers or someone with a strong moral compass, can often be both.
In such dire circumstances, would it not be the humane thing to intervene? And that’s when Garland’s film throws down its most important observation – the job of a journalist is much harder. To record events without contaminating them, allowing the audiences to witness them at their most raw.
The one image I will carry from Civil War’s final stretch is the face of a distraught Kirsten Dunst’s Lee, as her worst fears come true. Unable to make sense of the violence around, she falls to her knees. It’s a testament to how disposable individual journalists can be, in situations like we’re seeing during Israel’s air strikes in Gaza. But then again in true Hollywood fashion, Lee wills herself to get up, point her camera, and like the soldiers around her, take the perfect shot.
*Civil War premiered at the Red Lorry Film Festival, and will release in Indian theatres on April 19.
