Review: CIVIL WAR

Weatherbeaten journalism team Lee and Joel set off across an America wracked by internal warfare to try and get the grail, to interview and photograph the beleaguered Trump-like President. Along for the ride are old time reporter Sammy and raw neophyte photographer Jessie. So begins one of the tensest road movies you are ever likely to see.

While not directly about the scenario of the effects of a second Trump term, the parallels are impossible to dismiss. The opening scene has the despot preparing a broadcast speech in which he tries out a number of superlatives to describe his blowhard rhetoric. Outside of that, though, the film is vague enough for events shown and referenced to have an even handed tone. When someone describes the Antifa Massacre, it's as natural a part of the conversation that it needs no explanation: we don't know if Antifa massacred or were massacred. 

Some combatants are in civvies, others in uniform. There is an anti-government military called the Western Forces as well as the old regular army. Both sides are well equipped, drive the same kind of tanks and wear camo and Kevlar. One pair of uniformed soldiers explain that their situation has been reduced to kill or be killed, whichever side they or their antagonist is on. Another pair in uniform are found mopping up after an atrocity and really could be from either side as they themselves are reduced to expressing the power of armed combatants as givers and takers of human life.

In a design coup, the Western Forces flag is the stars and stripes but there are only two stars. It is the very kind of cultural shock that the great sci-fi dystopia cinema of the '70s would use to freeze viewer comfort with something wrong but very plausible. If not quite seeing the apes riding horses and cracking whips in Planet of the Apes it's close to the corporate anthem being played in Rollerball. Writer/director Alex Garland has been here before in 28 Days Later, Annihilation, Ex Machina and Men, weaving the familiar with the confronting to feed his audience's imagination. I would imagine this film is an uncomfortable watch for Americans.

While the theme is grim and constant and the sense of unease is set at a unending pulse, Garland has packed it up in the familiar genre of the road movie. This means dialogue and personal change are on the menu and Kirstin Dunst's hard-arsed photojournalist must find a way out of her stress at the potential disasters in the car in the shape of the old man and the young woman who might not only endanger everyone's lives but destroy the entire mission. Wagner Moura's rockstar approach to his profession recalls the depictions of Sean Flynn and Tim Page from Dispatches. Cailee Spaeny lets her character's enthusiasm collide with the realities of what she's got herself into. Stephen McKinley Henderson provides great gravitas. Beyond them is a Gulliver's Travels or Heart of Darkness of a cast who work to provide a quilt of foreseeable true life horror.

If Civil War falters anywhere it is in its length. At 1.49 it isn't outrageously long but there is so much repetition of military action and some individual scenes of it feel interminable that we are in danger of losing sight of our central quartet. I can understand a desire to convey the fatiguing grind of a mounted assault or a sniper baiting but too often we live through scenes that have long made their points. I could easily imagine that a cut of about 30 minutes would not be noticed.

But Civil War is not just about its points (to varying degrees of subtlety) but the flow of the experiences we are following. It's Brecht's proposition: don't make me ask what I would do if I were him or her, make me wonder if I would act the same under the circumstances. Garland's vision of a torn nation is offered as a sobering choice to world audiences, what would we do if it came to this? One scene depicts a community apparently completely untouched by the devastation. It bears a heavy eeriness similar to the sight of Manhattan streets without traffic or the shattered amusement park. As we recognise this vision with relief before seeing its price, we might wonder how we are still the way we are. I'll finish with a quote from John Webster because I don't do that enough: Say, 'tis well, security some men call the suburbs of hell, only a dead wall between.

Civil War is on general release.

FOOTLOOSE @ 40

Ren moves with his mum to a rural town where they have family connections. There they find the town has legislated itself back to the days of the Pilgrim Fathers where teachers talk of book banning (and then burning) and the lead vocalist of the Statschurch has pushed the act of dance into abolition. The town's teens adopt a kind of '50s as imagined by the '80s look and sneak off to the local drive-in diner to blare the kind of Toto-esque dreck that was regulation in the culture that had never quite done punk right. And, they dance. Then the preacher man appears to make sure his daughter has enough pocket money for pizza and the whole thing collapses into an anhedonic void. Chicago mover Ren has his work cut out.

The reason I avoided this film at the time of its release is the same that kept me away from others like Flashdance or Xanadu: they were featured as clips on Countdown for weeks at a time and looked like pants. I remember being over at a friend's for dinner and someone there, among the kewl inner city post-punques, admitted to being curious about Footloose and it was like saying they wanted to try out discipline pornography. Career beneficiary Kevin Bacon talked about his spiky hair in an interview, saying it had started a trend. While it's more early Ziggy than Johnny Rotten, it's still a style that had splashed across the pages of checkout magazines for latter part of the previous decade. So last night's view was my first and I did it because I wanted to get into how '80s it would be and, like Class last week, get my knives out for a hit job. Trouble is, it's actually pretty good.

Once you clear the absurd premise (though it's based on a real case) you'll see a surprisingly grown up piece of '80s teen rebellion cinema that feels very comfy to walk around in. John Lithgow's Reverend Moore begins the movie with a screaming sermon about his role as the town's moral shepherd. Afterwards, when Ren is meeting some of the locals, someone mentions the banning of Slaughterhouse Five from the library and Ren calls it a good book. When facing off the resulting icy stares, he digs in an calls it a classic. The guy whose banned the book says that Ren must like reading and makes it sound like a barb.

That's the kind of thing I feared the movie was going to do, bang all the nuance down and harvest the dramatic spikes and outcrops. But after this start, these begin smoothing out as we get to see depth in the characters, including Rev. Hardarse. His zeal is given motivation from a family tragedy in which his son died in a crash while zonked on booze (and presumably, too much dancin') but it's not really needed. It's actually pretty easy to forget until they remember to bring it out again. Nevertheless, the church leader's influence over the town's culture manages to play both as caricature and character. Allowing this as a viewer requires some doublethink but it can work and, if it does, the big underlying theme is rendered visible.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was gearing up for his second term. For four long years he had been marshalling the wizards of trickledown economics (i.e. bullshitters who got away with it) and elevating the profiles of moral majority (who were neither) interests until a senior staffer defended the despoiling of forests by saying that Armageddon was around the corner so who cared about the environment. And let he then, the dogs of capitalism call'ed Reganomics, wild in the streets and hungry. You can read up on Reagan at your leisure. It's really no stretch to see the town in the movie as the model of Reagan McFagin-ville. Between the redneck boys who challenge Ren to a joust of tractor chicken (it's won by a shoelace which you'll have to see to understand) and the parents zealots who actually do end up burning books (so are they in favour of the concept of property or not?). This last act gives Lithgow's preacher a moment of believable and relieving depth as he prevents it continuing. At home he fights both wife and daughter (which is when the spectre of the son gets dusted off again) and it squeezes the narrative effectively.

I realise this article's getting all sloppy but that's in response to the strange way this film plays out, sometimes against itself, but ends up being thoroughly watchable. Part of this is due to performance. Kevin Bacon as Ren was not a newcomer to the screen (he has a pretty solid kill scene in Friday the 13th for starters) but this was his breakthrough. He gives Ren a quiet intensity that barely masks a growing anger at the worst of the town. Chris Penn gets to raise his character's goofiness into more serious territory. Sarah Jessica Parker pushes personality into Rusty that might have effectively remained a functional character. 

But my money goes to the one in the cast who did not climb to the celestium after this film, Lori Singer. Not only is she solid as the Reverend's daughter Ariel there's a moment I noted that will stick with me. She and Ren are in his car and getting closer to each other in their prolonged love/hate courtship. Ren breaks the mood by regressing into his adolescence and telling her she's probably been through a few guys. Her expression deflates, her face is asking "again?" before it hardens up again and she's back in self-medicating sass-girl mode. After that, she is beyond viewer dismissal, not just a romantic interest or the rebel child of the preacher, she's a rounded player and worth the trouble.

Yes, this is an '80s movie so you get the big inspiring training montage where Ren transforms himself into a dance warrior from a Wagner opera. But you also get an impressive teen stunt where Ariel tries to get out of one moving car and into another with an oncoming lorry charging like a megaton bull (don't say that aloud; people will look at you). And it is an '80s movie with a big public meeting scene in which a teenager schools the old duffers on the council. And it is an '80s movie in the the big dance off at the end (you are not going to convince me that that is a spoiler) while the big Kenny Loggins number blasts out of the speakers. But that's probably why you started watching in the first place.

When that was happening, I asked myself if I actually would have enjoyed this one at the time and I couldn't quite find the answer. As a recent Griffith University graduate with a lot of cinema theory under my belt and a life long allegiance to one rationalisation under Godard, part of me stayed away. But that was under the assumption that the movie would be far more clumsily didactic than it was. As someone who has always enjoyed the pop end of culture, however big and clumsy it gets, big football chanting pop songs, eye-piercing colour schemes and advertising fonts (especially in the '80s) and big goopy movies like this. I would have had no trouble recognising the look and feel borrowed from the previous decade's New Hollywood auteurs (this film never looks like Grease, even in the finale). I would have smirked at the radio fodder attempts at noo wave music and the fashions that made everyone as criminally vanilla as Ally Sheedy after the makeover scene in The Breakfast Club. I might have felt intrigued by the absence of a reason for Ren and his mother to trade big, fun Chicago for the modern Roanoke (I kept wondering if it was DV-related).

The fact is that Footloose surprised me. While I was never convinced of the gravity of Reverend Moore's zeal it was played with enough depth to allow me to put it on the fable shelf and follow the more immediate journey of acceptance and compassion. No, it's not Last Temptation but nor is it Porky's and whether it's a serious critique peeping out of the blouse of a dance movie or not, it kind of ... works.

CLASS @ 40 (Spoilers, so I can discuss this one)

Working class scholarship boy Jonathon gets into an exclusive school and then gets pranked by his roommate Skip on his first day. A prank arms race later and they're friends forever. After several disastrous attempts to get Jonathon a girlfriend, Skip sends him off to a pickup joint at the nearby metropolis. A few more disasters later and Jonathon gets picked up by the hot-as older woman Ellen who takes him back to her hotel to have sex in the glass walled lift and then to her room for more. Jonathon returns to the dorm swinging Ellen's trophy knickers which jets him to school hero within minutes. Then, Skip invites him back to the family mansion for Christmas Jonathon fits in fine before Skip's mum turns up. It's Ellen.

When this film was approaching release (in the third last day of 1983 so I'm counting it as 1984) the trailers promised a naughty update of The Graduate, focussing on the lift scene and a few odd slapstick moments. What I saw at the end of the year on VHS was a dramedy that fell somewhere between Ordinary People and Porky's but with the convictions  or depth of neither. Yet, it's made of the kind of ingredients that might make real substance from its title. Instead, it's goofy pranks in the dorm and attempted steamy sex with Ellen on the town. The notion of social stratification implied by the title is barely addressed and the other side of it, of savoir faire, is lost in the tension between the school friends. There is one action that might claim the concept of grace but it is placed there so much telescoping and leaden writing that it's as though the film is saying: "See? This is classy!" And even then, that decision is forced by subcultural norms.

Skip's big moment, after his discovery of Jonathon's lover's identity, is also undermined by how he came by the information he could use against Jonathon. He tricked it out of him in a prank. Talk about a forced hand compelling an act of grace. By this stage there's also another Jumbo plodding around. After that cathartic discovery, Skip's father visits him in the dorm to say that Ellen has admitted herself to pyschiatric care. It's Anna Karenina under the train but this is the '80s so she's off to get some zombie pills and a talking cure. The coast is then clear for the lads to duke it out in the mud until they fall over laughing at how crazy it all is.

A scene between Skip's parents, after Ellen has drunk herself numb at dinner, pretending Jonathon wasn't across the table, shows Dad in a patrician rage at her disgrace. This woman, caged by her life, had chosen a form of pleasure acceptable to her that offered something flavoursome and forbidden. Yes, it's adultery and that's a real issue but the punishment she finds is that of a wayward wife but an errant mother. There are complications here: as soon as she found out that Jonathon wasn't a uni student but a schoolboy she abandoned him in a moment of horror, but then, later, she prevents a second rejection by him (ever the honourable bloke) with a fresh seduction. As much as the stunning and effective Jacqueline Bissett provides this film, she is, after all reduced to a teenage wank reverie and then, insofar as she is at all real, immured in the thick silencing purgatory of a mental facility. Oh, and all that time that Skip's dad was telling him about this, those burgundy knickers were still stretched between the horns of a wall ornament over Skip's dorm bed. Skip had just left them up there, after knowing whose they were.

So, I could do what other people of my age do when they talk about this one and mention Rob Lowe's scandal, Andrew McCarthy's fading career, and the appearance of John and Joan Cusack as well as Virginia Madsen, all in adolescent form before their own breakthroughs later in the decade. But, having done just that, I'll instead recall my impressions on first seeing the film as a twenty-two year old. 

This was at the end of my first year after uni, what they might smirkingly call a gap year now, but so much of what I gleaned there was still active. I saw a mild comedy that mixed uneasily with a coming of age story in which the reversal of the autumn/spring partnering was offered as both a boyhood miracle and a sinister exploitation. People who have never read Lolita but think they know it generally don't know that it condemns its predatory narrator. Back then, at twenty-two (I had actually read Lolita by then) I couldn't quite make it past the contempt in Ellen's fate (even that it was reported rather than shown). We were meant to join the lads in a big laugh now they've really gone through it together and will be friends for life. Watching it again last night, this effect, the screaming void of hollowness beneath that laugh or at least the attempted diversion of it, made me wince. Two boys chortling over how they made it through, who would be headed for societal leadership and the kind of class reinforcement only hinted at here, are effectively laughing at all the chumps who are yet to be ground by their own life lessons. Maybe the film should have been called Status Quo.

Viewing notes: Class is currently available via subscription on Prime.