Point and Shoot: CIVIL WAR

A tense provocation, writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War has sequences of frightening violence wherein the logic of action movies is turned inside out to make us root for the shooting to stop. Our lead characters are photojournalists courageously and recklessly charging after the action. The bullets fly and we flinch with them as the action charges ahead. We see bloodshed as intimate, personal—bodies hanging in an abandoned car wash, piled in mass graves behind farm houses, pulled apart by machine guns. The movie imagines a near-future America devolved into sectarian warfare, rebel troops amassing outside Washington to take on a fascistic president who has, in his third term, disbanded the FBI and shoots protestors. This isn’t the queasy-making romance of a lost cause, or a wishful thinking, that’s been burbling up with Civil War nostalgia for 150 years. If the United States were actually to fall into an all-out second Civil War it would look like this—balkanized, radicalized, individuated, dangerous and unpredictable. It’d be three backwoods guys with AR-15s guarding their local gas station. It’d be a random militia holed up trying to overpower and execute soldiers. It’d be insurgents storming the capitol.

Garland doesn’t worry overmuch about how we get there. The movie starts years into the conflict as we get the sense the war is drawing close to a climactic point of desperation. Dialogue has some free-floating allusions to past massacres, controversies, and realignments. We get the gist. The screenplay never announces the policy positions of its combatants, although a reasonably intelligent viewer could pin down the overarching particulars of the state of play. Instead, it stirs up its political intensity with immediacy of intent. It communicates clearly and directly, and with great force, ideas about the hell war puts all people through, and of the complicated natures of the specific people who make their mission the witnessing of it. This is a bleak vision of how some people are just waiting for an excuse to revel in chaos, and the movie plays it off with a throughly muddled sense of rooting interests. Of course we want our main characters to survive; that’s movie logic. But by stripping out actual specific policy or parties, we see only the tension between chaos and order. Stopping for speeches or debates that lay out the stakes might serve to soften the walloping dread and loud gunfire of sectarian violence and its rippling collateral damage. It’s a portrait of society in free fall, a little nervous about how plausible it could be.

Garland has often been a filmmaker interested in the fragility of the human body. Look at the time-warping drugs of Dredd or zombified rage that can infect from merely a drop in 28 Days Later. Or see the blurry lines between man and nature in the haunting alien landscapes of Annihilation and between man and machine in Ex Machina. With Civil War, Garland takes that investment in how fragile people are and pushes further into how that fragility is inextricable form the systems and institutions we build. It finds that larger perspective in sticking small and personal amidst the national ramifications. It’s confined to a picture of photographers dutifully witnessing while getting a charge out of following along—and it makes them vulnerable, too. Some (Kirsten Dunst) are disillusioned about the value of their job; her slow bleeding-out of conviction is a marvelously controlled and subtle performance. Others (Wagner Moura) gets a sick thrill out of the danger. Still others (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are tired veterans of the business, while a young newbie (Cailee Spaeny) gets a shock to her system as she enters the fray. All of them are shaken and stretched, with their fragility drawn out to the movie’s sick, cold conclusion that’s as inevitable as its central dialectic: guns and cameras are both point and shoot. The power of a still image is juxtaposed with the moving image—weaponizing a grainy freeze frame silence in the flow of clinical digital filmmaking to feel the etching of history and the foreshortening of context in each stuck frame—as it creates a tension between its creation and the chaos that breeds it. We’re left with the empty pit-of-the-stomach worry, and the wonder at what’s more powerful than fragile people rushing into history with a gun and a camera shooting in tandem—revolution written with or driven by a photo op.

Spice World: DUNE

An audience first coming to Frank Herbert’s Dune through its latest adaptation will recognize its component parts from sci-fi and fantasy that have followed its original 1965 publication. It has Avatar’s interplanetary extractive industry colonists, Game of Thrones’ feuding feudal families, and Star Wars’ galactic empire, potential rebels, and mysterious psychic sects. Though threads from its tapestry are shared in its genre compatriots, its sense of ponderous impenetrability, a DeMille-by-way-of-Asmiov majestic Old Testament density, is an impressive edifice all its own. Denis Villeneuve is the third filmmaker to attempt a screen translation of this major work in the sci-fi canon. After David Lynch wrestled it down to one film to mixed results in 1984, and a team of television makers did a more faithful miniseries for Sci-Fi Channel in 2000 (with cheap digital effects that were slightly impressive at the time, but now have more in common with Windows 98 screensavers), this 150-minute effort tells the first half of the book. We meet the Atredies, a ruling family (parents Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac, and son Timothée Chalamet) who have, at the Emperor’s command, taken over the production of spice—a drug that doubles as spaceship fuel—from the evil Harkonnens. That family got rich off the mines on the desert planet of Arrakis, but fought the indigenous Fremen at every turn. The Atredies hope to win wealth with peace instead. Nice idea, but the sturm und drang of galactic unrest churns conspiracies in which nasty, greedy, scrabbling people in dark rooms and ominous shadows scheme to take them down.

Villeneuve sets the stage well. His pivot from the heavy thrillers that brought him to Hollywood (Prisoners, Sicario) to ponderous science fiction (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) has been a productive one. His eye for cold majesty and ear for terse genre dialogue is the keen balance of cinematic poetry and prose that makes for some fine stunning vistas of imagination. Here we get something like and yet unlike other space operas. There’s a love of grand takes offs and landings, watching the gears turn on enormous dragonfly-winged helicopters and monolithic ships, and the sliding doors on the side of New Age ziggurats rising out of the desert like something in a nouveau-ancient-Egyptian-revival. He knows how to accumulate detail and give it the undertow of inevitable tragedy. He creates a world of awe-filled spectacle, balanced between dread and drama while playing off its sense of having returned from an alien future world with the kind of attentive visual splendor you’d find in a Biblical epic or Shakespearean tragedy. One might think of L.P. Hartley’s famous line claiming “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So, too, the future. Here we are dropped into a tangle of ongoing political machinations, colonial strife, religious prophecies and rituals, and cut-throat capitalist ceremony, and watch as various factions—draped in flowing robes and bedazzled headpieces, skin-tight battle suits and protective gear—intone gravely about all they fear is to come. We learn the various groups’ traditions and values, their rituals and hopes, and then watch them all collide and blow apart.

The result is a grand introduction that may or may not go anywhere. It leaves the sense of feeling incomplete. As it trudges along so seriously and full of grave pronouncements, Chalamet contemplates the heavy crown of his future, while the others strut and pose and fret in cavernous sets. It gets a bit monotonous from time to time. I found myself spending the last thirty minutes or so wondering on what cliffhanger it would end more than I was wrapped up in the narrative. Maybe the whole thing would play better after a second feature, cut together as one five-hour sprawl. Because it has the soul of a Ten Commandments (maybe the best comparison point, if you bled it of its overtly colorful camp qualities) straining to escape and go on and on and on. Instead it finds every thread and arc halted abruptly with a cut to black while somehow still stretching to fill its space. (The last line: “this is only the beginning.”) So it’s half a movie. But it’s an intriguing one, full of striking design and heavy soundscapes. It’s a feast of bit parts for a huge eclectic ensemble of familiar actors crowding around the margins—Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jason Momoa, Zendaya—who are prepared to chew around expositional jargon with perfect gravity. It has images that tower with the most literally awesome of any Hollywood epic, and sound that rumbles and quakes with import. Clearly everyone involved cared. It’s an experience, compelling with every wide shot and sonic flourish. But it’s hard to feel too excited when it hits an inciting incident and then peters out.

For Better; For Worse: FENCES

Fences is the sort of smart, big hearted, densely written, deeply felt, smartly blocked, stirringly performed theatrical experience that can knock you sideways for the rest of the day.  Denzel Washington’s powerful film adaptation of August Wilson’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play is thoughtful, patient, considered, literary. It uses the medium of cinema to recreate the full feeling of having spent and been spent by a consuming, heavy-duty, satisfying evening at the playhouse. Feeling no pressure to open up or embellish upon the text, Washington uses screen staging to bring full expression to Wilson’s writing, letting actors roam the frame, boxed in by their circumstances and holding court for each other as a way to feel heard, even and especially if they’re simply talking past each other. Here is a film with no frivolous exchanges. Every line is imbued with forceful personality and deep meaning. A complicated film, this rich text is contrary to the usual contemporary cycle of instant reaction and shallow analysis. You have to sit with it. You have to live in it. The film creates a fully formed world out of a backyard, entire lives out of conversations.

We sit in and around the home of Troy and Rose, a black couple living paycheck to paycheck in 1950s’ Pittsburgh. They have a mostly happy life, but there are unresolved dramas, neglected compromises, and lingering regrets. He (Washington) is a frustrated garbage man still hoping to get ahead, discrimination be damned. Once a potential Negro league star, he just missed the desegregation of the major leagues. He’s trapped by what could have been, caught in the tug of war between prejudice and opportunity that defined the Northern migration of African Americans looking for better futures in the time between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. And yet for as much as his circumstances defined his possibilities and his worldview, he has made progress, with a steadfast wife (Viola Davis), a loyal friend (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a troubled brother (Mykelti Williamson), and two sons (one grown (Russell Hornsby), the other (Jovan Adepo) almost there). He can’t quite reconcile his offspring’s ambitions (jazz and football) with his sense of practicality. He worries for them, and though times have changed and are about to continue changing, he can’t quite see it, because they didn’t change in time for him.

Human and humane, Wilson’s worldview makes the story and characters not a sociological specimen or mere vehicle of messaging. No, Fences is stirringly true to life, with characters full of complications. And into these people a perfect cast breathes astonishing life. In long, complicated, dense dialogues and monologues they speak. We hear them gossip, reminisce, plan and dream, and yet underneath we can hear their fears and see their foibles. Fully rounded and shaded figures, they aren’t always easy to get a read on. They reveal flaws and disagreeable aspects of themselves, sometimes through trying to hide their truth, and other times because they’ve run out of obfuscations and must now confront their human failings. There’s a core elemental quality to the film’s specificity, true to Wilson’s sharp evocation of race, class, time, and space, and his keen ear for the ways in which speech can bring people closer and pull them apart, how the sum total of a person’s experience can both expand and contract a person’s possibilities. We can see and hear how some are taken for granted, and others show affection through gruffness, how cruelty can be a kindness and how compassion can flower even in withering relational pains.

What’s most thrilling about Washington’s directorial approach here is how he turns the movie house into a playhouse, importing all the immediacy of live theater while retaining all the power of the wide big screen image. He finds large emotional scenes subtly wrought, moments of deep psychology and powerful exchanges played not to the back rows but perfectly calibrated with delicate electrifying intimacy for the cameras. He, with cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, builds frames with a proscenium in mind, not stagey but thrillingly contained. The blocking (often a lost art in a world of bland coverage and frivolous CG-assisted swoops) is thought through so deeply, each actor’s placement on the screen, as well as every element of production design, strategically situated to reveal and deepen the emotion of the moment. Watch how a fence becomes metaphor sitting unfinished behind people working to build separations. See how a tree looms above, sturdy growth, or a bat leans ready to strike, full of unspoken potential. Spot movement through a back window, a sight alternating between comfortable domesticity and intentional isolation.

A most intelligently constructed film, Washington has engineered every moment to highlight the power of the play’s text, and the impressively felt, effortlessly deployed performances by himself and his tremendous co-stars. This is a movie of small gestures, quiet revelations, sharp exchanges, quicksand confessions, and dazzling complexity. In its smallness, it grows big, breathtakingly apparent that it’s a major work. More than a surface transposition from theater to cinema, Washington (who surely knows the play inside and out, having starred with Davis in its 2010 Broadway revival) interprets, making it a vital and unshakeable moviegoing experience. He provides space for his talented cast to inhabit their characters, digging deep into their drives and desires, dramas and disagreements, hard pasts and talented possible futures. Through their conversations whole worlds open up. Without visualizing a flashback, Washington need only let the camera linger as he or one of his colleagues holds forth in colorful language, evoking whole strains of conflict and trauma or love and loss in a nod, a fleeting expression, a softly spoken word. It is a rich, dense, and hearty meal in a multiplex otherwise full of empty trifles.