BATTLE LINES
Things get real for Kirsten Dunst in ‘Civil War’
Friday sees Kirsten Dunst as a veteran news photographer in “Civil War,” British filmmaker Alex Garland’s provocative imagining of a dystopian Second American Civil War as witnessed by a crew of reporters.
The Oscar-nominated Garland (“Ex Machina”) skips details, history, even who the various armed forces are, to plunge the viewer into the heat and horror of battle as four unarmed reporters in an SUV clearly marked PRESS — Dunst, Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla), Wagner
Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson — navigate a dangerous drive to Washington, D.C.
“One of the things I took as an assumption was I don’t need to tell anybody why there’s a civil war,” Garland, 53, said Monday night in Manhattan at a post-screening panel. “Because I think in conversation over a beer, everybody would know why the civil war occurred.
“I wrote this four years ago — and if you think back four years ago is very like it is right now. People were concerned about division, polarization, populist politics that lead to extremism. Therefore something authoritarian the way it is shown here.”
“We shot the film in order,” Dunst, 41, revealed. “But the last two weeks were intense for me. The noise was as loud as you hear it. Very loud and very intense explosions. That stuff gets in your body even when you go home and see your kids and you’re fine.”
“You’re giving information to your body but your body doesn’t know what’s true,” noted Moura, 47, a former journalist. “Your mind is someplace else, but the body takes time to shake it off.”
“It was very immersive the way we did it,” Dunst added. “The way we shot it: as real as possible.”
“The film,” Garland emphasized, “is attempting to act like reporters. Just showing events. But I’m not a reporter, I’m a filmmaker and I do have an agenda.
“Sometimes, in interviews for this, people say, ‘This is not a political film.’ And I say, ‘Of course it is! What are you talking about! It’s intensely a political film.
“It’s coming from a place of anger but it’s attempting to modulate that, think about it and process it in ways of conversation. I provide dots that can be drawn together according to the individual and what they bring in.
“This president is manifestly a fascist. He’s dismantled the FBI which legally threatens him. He’s killing his own citizens with air strikes. And as a third time president, he’s dismantling the Constitution. I don’t know how much clearer those dots can be drawn in terms of their implication.”
“Civil War” opens Friday.