The familiar beats of “Civil War”
The film owes a debt to previous looks at war journalism
I intentionally did not read much about “Civil War” prior to seeing it (and a lot has been written), and I was surprised to see how little it focused on the politics of the civil war itself and how much it was about the ethics of war journalism, especially war photography. (I’ll add that it’s very intense and I enjoyed it quite a bit.)
There were some familiar beats in this film. And I don’t mean that as a criticism — I think some things felt familiar because the filmmakers did their homework. But two previous films that I had largely forgotten about jumped back into my memory as I was watching “Civil War”:
In “A Thousand Times Goodnight” (2013), Juliette Binoche plays a photojournalist who travels to some of the most dangerous places on Earth because she feels compelled to chronicle atrocities, particularly suicide bombings. Her frequent travels and risk-taking cause strain within her family and even put her daughter’s safety at risk. Her main skill, besides photography, is convincing subjects to let her take their picture, a skill that she justifies to herself through the importance of her work. But she ultimately finds herself in a situation where she is helping to promote images of an atrocity that is too grotesque even for her, and it wrecks her.
“A Private War” (2018) follows the real-life story of Marie Colvin, an American journalist who worked for the Sunday Times for decades. Colvin had a reputation for being a particularly daring and courageous war correspondent, and suffered various injuries on assignment before finally being killed in an airstrike while covering the Syrian siege of Homs.
You can definitely catch echoes of these and other films in “Civil War,” which follows a veteran photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst) mentoring a younger woman (Cailee Spaeny) in the craft, teaching her to detach herself from emotional commitments and rooting interests in the name of Getting The Shot. That discipline is put to the test for both of the women in the final scene.
Other aspects of the film take what are pretty familiar tropes in war journalism and just place them in a somewhat unfamiliar setting — various American states in a modern shooting war with each other. We see, for example, journalists hanging out in a hotel in New York City with frequent power outages and shaky WiFi, some drinking themselves silly, some strategizing over the next place to go for the story. We see the journalists spending a night at a refugee camp, negotiating with armed locals for fuel, struggling with whether embedding with a platoon is good for the story or a compromise of journalistic ideals, etc. — all things we’ve seen among media in places like Baghdad, Sarajevo, and Mogadishu.
A friend of mine who has photographed violent uprisings elsewhere once spoke to me about the importance of using a manual SLR camera with black-and-white film that you can develop yourself, since it doesn’t require unreliable electricity, and since film negatives have a remarkably long shelf life. I was pleased to see the younger photojournalist in the movie following this discipline.
As for the politics, I was struck by how almost absent they were from the film. Oh, the film provided some inkling about the two warring sides in the US — the federal government is shooting journalists, after all, while the rebel faction welcomes journalists alongside them. But it is not unusual for a rebel group to want to use journalists to help publicize their work, and it doesn’t tell us whether they would have any greater a commitment to liberal democracy once they seize power than the regime they seek to overthrow.
But for the most part, this isn’t a film about the people who start or wage a civil war or about the issues it’s fought over. It’s about those who cover it and the price they pay to do so.