film criticism – Cine Obscura.

Civil War’s Amnesia

There is nothing worse then an unserious film taking itself too seriously. Civil War has all the quality of a mid-tier episode of The Walking Dead.

It has been a long time since the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Hal Ashby, et al, were on hand to make searing artworks on the hypocrisies of the day. American political cinema of the 1970’s and 80’s was a beast. Take Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in Full Metal Jacket when he stares down the camera to tell us about all the “exotic” people of an ancient culture he has come to kill. The irony of his words cut like a knife through post-Vietnam America. Then there is the slow-zoom out in the final scene of All the Presidents Men. It presents a titillating tableau: Nixon’s inaugural ceremony blares on the television while Woodward and Bernstein bang out his downfall on their typewriters. Sidney Lumet’s Network lampooned greedy TV execs, so desperate for a bloody scoop that they onboard a murderous domestic terrorist group. These films are powerful because they make powerful statements about politicians, war, American myth, journalism, and the discursive power of screen media. Moreover, they’re not afraid to make those statements. They exist on a continuum of thoughtful cinema that bypasses partisan nonsense and cuts to the very core of our human concerns in the 20th century: the difference between war and murder; truth and lies; news and a paid fabrication.

I say all this to juxtapose these earlier masterpieces of political cinema to the lukewarm offerings of the 21st century: Alex Garland’s Civil War. Civil War is so toothless, sloppy and risk adverse that it says nothing at all. And I don’t think it’s because the film doesn’t want to make a statement, I think the film is too stupid to come up with one. It’s capitalistic excess at its very worst: a film trying to take advantage of a very specific cultural moment while offering no salient commentary or satire. It’s less a political cinema than a reactionary one.

Not only does Civil War embody no memory of its political forebears, it presents itself as a road movie with barely a concept of a road movie. A group of photojournalists must drive to Washington D.C. in time to document the “Western Alliance” capture of the U.S. president. Each situation they encounter on the road is more anonymous than the last: a gas station full of rednecks holding faceless hostages; commando Jesse Plemons waving a gun over a mass grave of more faceless people; a booby-trapped Santa’s Village.

Garland misses a vital and obvious opportunity by merely placing this film on the road with no impression of American road films. Get Wim Wenders on the horn. Think of Paris, Texas, where the road imagery links the viewer to Travis’ (Harry Dean Stanton) fractured family and identity. Think of Thelma and Louise where the characters encounter people and situations that directly reference their actions and the themes of the movie. This is basic stuff. The characters in Civil War mostly encounter random things that have anything to do with them. No one is making choices. The bones of the story have osteopenia: the characters are just driving to D.C. and running into stuff. Is there some grandiose symbolism regarding political polarization, new screen media, the United States, and Santa’s Village that I am missing here? Doubt it.

The characters are not much better. Lee (Kirsten Dunst), saddled with a perpetual look of determination, plods through the film, dispensing oh-so-adroit wisdom to the ingénue la photographie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). The other leads make even less of an impression, and the characters who die are just red shirt inserts designed to take bullets. Such missteps lower the stakes in a film where everything should be at stake. Civil War also cannot handle a bit of logic surrounding its most important story objects. Why is Jessie shooting and hand developing 35mm film in a war zone when she doesn’t have to? Why is she shooting with that camera at night? Surely, both of these are suboptimal uses of her time as a photo-journalist. Half her pictures would be blurry and under exposed. The object negates its own meaning if you can’t imagine why it’s there in the first place.

And it just goes on like that. It might take a leap of logic to imagine what sort of militia force would let journalists take photos of them murdering unarmed people. You may then ask yourself why such blood thirsty cretins wouldn’t just murder the journalists too. Couple these preposterous scenarios with very bland filmmaking and you might have the most forgettable political thriller ever made. It looks like an advertisement. So many shots are in shallow focus and also in the dark. If that’s what you’re doing, why not just shoot the whole movie on an iPhone? It’s cheaper.

What is the consequence? How are the actions of the characters driven by an engagement with media? The entire point of critiquing journalism in a film such as this is because it is a matter of tremendous consequence. But here, visually and narratively, the audience has nothing to grab on to. Garland did not have to take a partisan stance in order to give his film thematic heft. Not being American, he was in a unique position to do so. Instead, he coyly denies engagement even of the allegorical variety. The “Western Alliance” – a partnership between California and Texas – lets us know that, not only is this film unserious, it’s also unaware of opportunities for black comedy since it seems totally unaware how funny that is. There is nothing worse than an unserious film taking itself too seriously. Civil War has all the quality of a mid-tier episode of The Walking Dead.

Why do we accept these mediocre thunk pieces? Is there nothing better on TV? There is something deeply cynical and unethical about taking something as serious as a nation’s ideological divide and turning it to pablum. The central question of the film is “What kind of American are you?” the implication being that regardless of the answer to that question, everyone asked it is indeed an American. That’s about the only thing that matters: getting Americans to buy movie tickets. Civil War is at best a lazy capitalization on a cultural moment, and at worst totally stupid.

Review: Men (Garland, 2022)

“Men” is a feast for the eyes, but not for the mind.

It is easy to forgive certain films, especially horror films, that display a certain lack of expertise. That is: well intentioned film that fall a little south of what constitutes a robust story, or cohesive thematics, but makes up for it with some rollicking good horror. Barbarian (dir. Zach Cregger, 2022) immediately comes to mind. Then there are films like Men. Men is so stylish, yet so devoid of original thought that one comes away from it wondering how exactly everything went so terribly wrong.

Harper (Jessica Buckley) is haunted by the suicide of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Like most haunted people, Harper decides to go heal herself at an isolated manor house in rural England. Surely a reasonable decision. Things start off just fine. The house is cozy, and the landscape is lush and quiet. The owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), notes the fine pub, just yonder, in the village. Things take a turn when Harper ventures out on a walk. The creep factor is ramped up to eleven during an extended scene where Harper stumbles upon an old tunnel where she happily harmonizes with herself by making echoes. Suddenly, a naked man appears at the other end of the tunnel, screaming and charging towards her. It’s a great scene, but it is rendered totally inert by what follows… which is more of the same.

It is difficult to understand what exactly this film is trying to say about trauma, about men, about women, or about anything at all.

Literally, a parade of naked men who appear and disappear with absurd regularity. The story stops and starts at the tunnel scene. From then on, the film has nothing to say: not about Harper’s inner state, or trauma in general. Harper is just traumatized and guilt-ridden. Nothing else about who she is as a person is evident. Rather, her characterization rotates around the singular event of her husband’s death. Within that framework, it is difficult to understand what exactly this film is trying to say about trauma, about men, about women, or about anything at all.

In the village Harper visits a very creepy church where she encounters more crazed men in the form of a teenager who invites her to play hide and seek, and a vicar who lays a hand on her leg and asks her how she feels about causing her husband’s death. For, surely, her refusal to allow her husband to apologize for striking her was the catalyst for his death. Or not.

Men appears to be under the impression that the experience of trauma is highly succinct, without nuance, and thematically soulless.

Maybe we would feel something of what Harper is feeling if the relationship with said husband had any, you know, background information. Instead, it appears that Harper was born on the day of her husband’s death. Born, apparently, into a world populated only by weird, hostile men whose favoured pastime is being naked and staring at her. Men appears to be under the impression that the experience of trauma is highly succinct, without nuance, and thematically soulless. Once you’ve had one encounter with a creepy naked dude, perhaps you’ve had them all.

*SPOILER AHEAD*

The film culminates in a wacky denouement wherein a series of (yes, naked) now pregnant men give birth to a bunch of other naked pregnant men who give birth to her husband. What the fuck.

That is, more or less, the extent of it. Harper feels guilty. Harper is haunted. Period. Surely, it is not that “men” are incapable of creating a nuanced horror film about a traumatized woman. One need only look to Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster, 2019) to see that certain directors don’t think the word “trauma” composes the entirety of the thematic life of a motion picture. Really, that is what makes Men’s failures so egregious. Being that it is ostensibly about feminine interiority yet experiences an alexithymic understanding of what impact such experiences actually have on a person.

Men appears to be part of a burgeoning sub-genre concerning women whose husbands have committed suicide, and the haunting that follows. The Night House (dir. David Bruckner, 2020) immediately comes to mind as a much more successful foray that maintains the individuality of the main character while also containing striking, and potent thematic visuals on loss and grief. It seems silly to even bother commentating on the visual acumen of Men because the film is so stupid. Truly, there is nothing to see here but a parade of naked dudes. No thanks.

Review: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Schoenbrun, 2021)

Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.

If I were to imagine We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as a physical object in the world, I think it would be a notebook. It would be a dog-eared little number, its leatherette cover flaking away. Cheap but well loved. It would be an object filled with personality on the outside. If World’s Fair gets anything right, it’s just such an aesthetic. Beyond its fixation on a particular flavour of teen angst, World’s Fair does not work very well – using an approach that is often aggressively elliptical, and fails to take chances. Surely, this gen z tone poem was not built for me, but if it worked, that wouldn’t matter at all.

Casey (Anna Cobb) is a lonely wanderer, an isolated teenager. Her social interactions are restricted to her phone, and laptop. Nary do we see another character, friend, or foe, but from the glow of Casey’s screen. Over the course of the film, Casey becomes fixated on playing a game – We’re all Going to the World’s Fair – where players evoke some class of entity, then document the changes happening to their bodies, and consciousness, via video posts. Her activities draw the attention of a fellow player – an older man by the handle JLB.

Nothing much happens in World’s Fair. The film takes an elliptical tone, and tacitly refuses to resolve anything it brings up. Such a papery adherence to the narrative falls flat insofar it is extremely difficult to care about, or understand, Casey. Casey occupies the screen about 90 percent of the time, and yet we are not aligned with her. Her immaturity, the way she chooses to spend her time watching drivel online, coupled with a lack of character development, or other characters, makes the whole thing really very dull. It’s like that notebook with the flaking leatherette cover- but when you open it the pages are blank.

Simply, World’s Fair’s interrogations of moving image media are about as paper-thin as its narrative, and not approached very creatively.

These stylistic decisions have a point – and yes I’m aware of the horror subculture it is lampooning – in respect of moving image media, the blur between fantasy and reality, and the illusion of sociality before a screen. There’s a certain something to be said about Casey falling into the online vortex as if accessing the spirit realm, but that’s another thought-tree entirely. Simply, World’s Fair’s interrogations of moving image media are about as paper-thin as its narrative, and not approached very creatively. The audience is taken in and out of computer, and phone screens, the totalizing effect being that we’re just watching videos inside a movie.

If one considers World’s Fair in its hybridity – as a narrative occurring in both the material world, and online, one may ask why it limits itself to the surface of actual screens as the totality of its representational power. Why not exploit the lo-fi narrative to really go deep on that line between fiction and reality? It’s like the filmmaker left themselves a wide-open space to experiment but forgot to show up. Long shots of Casey staring at her laptop set a tone, but it just goes on like that. Do we really need a whole movie about what it feels like to chat with strangers on your computer late at night? The film never proves itself clever enough to subvert the aesthetics of the thing it is satirizing – which seems, to me anyway, a little bit important if your aim is to critique, or comment, or whatever. World’s Fair caves to the yawning time dilation that occurs between a depressed teenager, and the tumult of her feelings, but totally subverts its strength as a tone poem by taking itself on as an academic think-piece. Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.

Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.

The ellipticity comes out as deliberate, contrived, and joyless. The world of the film is totally uninteresting. Its narrow focus on Casey is to the exclusion of anything else, and just who is Casey? Am I supposed to believe that she knows no one, and never talks to her parents? Loneliness isn’t a personality trait. Casey’s isolation, and alienation, would feel much more immediate, pressing, dare I say, important if there were some contrasts between the world, and her subjectivity. It’s as though World’s Fair wants to say something, without saying it at all, while depriving itself of the means to say it in any case because it’s too stripped down. It falters between approaches solemnly, and humourlessly.

Or maybe I just don’t get the humour. Many who approach this film come away saying that it wasn’t made for them, and that’s why they did not like it. I think that’s stupid. People in their 30’s are not so culturally distinct from a teenager like Casey that they can’t understand the movie. Maybe the movie just isn’t very good. Maybe the movie is a debut feature by a talented filmmaker still trying to find their voice, and not a rarefied cultural object. Not yet anyway. Director Jane Schoenbrun has a film coming out this year – I Saw the TV Glow – early reviews at SXSW are positive, but some highlight similar issues to World’s Fair. In any case, TV Glow has more than one character, and I’m keen to see how Schoenbrun functions in a more dynamic cinemascape. I could surely not recommend World’s Fair but to the most fanatical lo-fi aficionados, lovers of tone poems, and those who need an entire movie about what it feels like to chat with strangers at night online. Surely, none of us film lovers got enough of that when we were Casey’s age. Time to relive it.