In Review: 'Civil War,' 'Sasquatch Sunset'

The latest from Alex Garland sends Kirsten Dunst through a self-destructing United States while, elsewhere, a group of Sasquatch faces a perilous future.

Civil War
Dir. Alex Garland
109 min.

For all the unsettling images in Alex Garland’s Civil War, one of the most jolting takes place not on the battlefield or along the roads of a wartorn United States but in a middle-of-nowhere small-town boutique. It’s there that Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) takes a moment to try on a dress. As she looks in the mirror, for a moment, the seen-it-all expression she usually wears melts away. She seems to consider the life she might have lived if she’d taken another path, perhaps staying near the parents she says are living on a farm and doing their best to ignore the chaos ripping the country apart. She could have just been a woman in a pretty dress. Except she couldn’t. A photojournalist whose name inspires awe in those who care about such things, Lee lives where the action takes her. Her attachments are professional, opportunistic, and, though not without warmth and affection, often fleeting. Downtime is a foreign concept. Someone’s always fighting somewhere, after all. She can buy that pretty dress, but she knows the occasion that will allow her to wear it might never come.

Set in the bloody final stretch of a near-future American civil war, Garland’s film has two interests, though one largely supersedes the other: what a civil war in 2020s America might look like and the lives of those who would chronicle it. Civil War’s (formerly) United States has splintered into factions during the third term of its current president (Nick Offerman). A union of California and Texas known as the Western Forces provides the most substantial opposition, but the film also references other players and causes, presumably just a sample of all the ideas and weaponry competing to steer the country’s course. It’s all intentionally vague. A reference to “the Antifa Massacre” encapsulates Civil War’s approach to its speculative future. Did Antifa do the massacring or were they massacred? We’ll never know. A final stretch clarifies matters a bit and Offerman’s president isn’t entirely without a resemblance to our 45th president, but it’s not an exact match, either.

We learn much more about Lee and her colleagues, or at least how they do their jobs. Working for Reuters alongside Joel (Wagner Moura), a similarly battle-tested reporter, Lee doesn’t lack for subjects to shoot in New York, where the unrest has spread to the streets. It’s while covering one protest that turns violent that she meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photojournalist who idolizes her. Though Lee offers no encouragement, Jessie refuses to leave her side and, with veteran New York Times journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), she becomes a member of a traveling party as Lee and Joel head to the front lines with the stated purpose of slipping behind them to photograph and interview the president.

An episodic and increasingly surreal journey awaits them as they take a roundabout route through West Virginia and Pennsylvania in an attempt to keep their distance from the battleground. Garland doesn’t try to avoid echoes of Apocalypse Now as they head toward the heart of darkness, finding skirmishes, roadside atrocities, and pockets of peacefulness whose mere existence seems like a cause for alarm. Some encounters, like a meeting with an openly racist soldier chillingly played by Jesse Plemons, hint at the shape and causes of the war, but the most chilling element of Civil War is not how transformed America appears as how much it looks like every other country in the process of falling apart. When Lee flashes back to her time in the Middle East, the urban warfare she remembers appears interchangeable with a parking garage battle that transpires somewhere on the road between New York and Charlottesville. The awful images that greet them at a gas station recall the atrocities of Bosnia, Kosovo, and other corners of the allegedly civilized world where neighbors became enemies. It’s a nightmare vision of every place that told itself “It couldn’t happen here” then watched as it did.

Moura, Henderson, and Spaeny all deliver strong performances, with Spaeny revealing layers of toughness beneath her character’s seemingly naive surface. (Jessie’s choice to use a classic analog Nikon seems like an affectation, but she proves she knows what she’s doing and, like Priscilla, Civil War uses Spaeny’s diminutive frame to great effect.) But Garland lets Dunst act as Civil War’s center of gravity, a weary tour guide to a disturbing world filled with images of ruin and jarringly staged immersive action scenes set to an unexpected but effective soundtrack that includes contributions from Suicide and De La Soul. And, like its heroine, the film is less interested in drawing conclusions than observing and preserving the moment. If, as the saying goes, journalism is the first rough draft of history, Civil War feels like a dispatch from an unrealized future, as seen through the eyes of a character who long ago realized she had no choice but to look so others could not look away. —Keith Phipps

Civil War is in theaters now.

Sasquatch Sunset
Dir. Nathan and David Zellner
89 min.

There are multiple stages involved in enjoying Sasquatch Sunset, a funny and surprisingly poignant curiosity from the Zellner brothers, Nathan and David, who previously directed Damsel, a Western written around a miniature horse named Butterscotch, and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, about a Japanese office-worker who goes searching for the hidden loot from Fargo. 

Stage One: “Wait, they’re not really going to do this, are they?” There’s no dialogue in Sasquatch Sunset, beyond a suggestive and impressively nuanced series of grunts and hand gestures, because it limits itself to the expressive range of the Sasquatch, a primitive creature that exists somewhere in the spectrum between humans and apes. And by “this,” we’re talking quite a lot of scatological humor, as these four bored Bigfoots pick their boogers and fiddle with their not-so-private parts, or have adverse reactions to the wild berries and mushrooms they should have left alone. Remember the part in Encino Man where Brendan Fraser’s caveman thaws out in a modern suburb, drinks from the water streaming toward a gutter, and looks curiously at a wiffle ball floating by? It’s like that. 

Stage Two: “Huh. I guess they really are going to do this.” Structured as a year-in-the-life of four Sasquatch as they make their way through a forest terrain that’s less of a shelter than it once was, the film leans heavily on these crude comic episodes in the first half before edging into the natural and unnatural threats that could turn the Sasquatch into myth before anyone knows they’re real. The creature costumes are exceptional in accommodating the human performances—Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg are the two name cast members, and the other two are played by Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner—but part of the absurd fun of the movie is our knowledge that these are actors jumping around and yipping like fools. The Zellners lean into that silliness as well as the child-like innocence and curiosity of a Sasquatch petting a skunk or fatally challenging a jungle cat. 

Stage Three: “Okay. This is actually working.” As the title implies, Sasquatch Sunset progresses toward obsolescence, occasioned mainly by the creatures either wandering into the human world or the human world encroaching on them. In the film’s funniest sequence, they stumble across a roadway that’s at first exotic and then enraging to them, as if they realize this wondrous alien landscape is an evolutionary bridge too far for them to cross. There are no other Sasquatch that we can see, so their long-term survival is tenuous at best, a fact that the Zellners mourn without dipping into sentiment, lest they spoil the ironic majesty of the ending. There’s a slightness to the conceit of Sasquatch Sunset that the Zellners cannot quite overcome—only an American indie film can be this goddamn whimsical—but there’s a generosity to the comedy and to its appreciation of the natural world that’s hard to resist. And goodness knows, the very idea of this film is highly resistible. — Scott Tobias

Sasquatch Sunset opens in limited release tomorrow.