Warning: The following contains spoilers for “Civil War.”
The United States has been destroyed in the “Civil War.” An armed alliance between Texas and California known as the Western Forces is on the verge of retaking a besieged capital. A team of journalists heads from New York City to Washington, DC, hoping to get one last interview with the president, an illegal third term gone rogue.
As they embark on their journey, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran photojournalist who has witnessed conflicts around the world, reluctantly takes the young and inexperienced Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) under her wing. Lee sees something of herself in Jessie and wants to spare her younger counterpart the disappointment and dismay she has come to feel. All the work she has done has seemingly led to nothing, as the nation hurtles toward a hopeless end.
Written and directed by Alex Garland, whose previous work includes the pessimistic and dystopian tales “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” the film walks a knife's edge, careful not to tilt toward one political perspective or another. It is often unclear who is fighting on which side, as a hypnotic frenzy seems to have taken over everyone.
No scene better sums up the film's complicated balancing act than the one involving actor Jesse Plemons, who appears in a cameo. Spaeny's character has been briefly separated from the other journalists he travels with, including Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). When the group finally finds Jessie, she is being targeted with another journalist in an open field by a small group of militiamen who have been throwing bodies from a truck into a crude mass grave.
An unnamed soldier of uncertain loyalty played by Plemons appears to be in charge. As Lee, Joel, Sammy, and another Dunst reporter try to figure out what to do, the decision is made to approach the soldiers in hopes of saving Jessie and her colleague.
Plemons' soldier, wearing a disconcerting pair of red plastic sunglasses while absentmindedly fingering his assault rifle, interrogates the group with eerie calm. He asks everyone to identify with what has already become the movie's signature line: “What kind of American are you?”
He starts shooting at those whose answer he doesn't like, revealing blatant racism and xenophobia. As it appears he's about to turn on Jessie, Sammy instantly crashes his truck, running over Plemons' character as they manage to escape, though not without losses.
Plemons' cold-blooded psychotic is one of the scariest things about “Civil War” and his scene is pivotal, essentially launching the reporters into the film's final act.
Kirsten Dunst, left, and Cailee Spaeny in the film “Civil War.”
(Near Murray/A24)
In real life, Dunst and Plemons are married and have two children. They met while filming a season of the television series “Fargo,” and also appeared together in Jane Campion's “The Power of Dog,” both earning Oscar nominations for their performances.
In a recent interview with Spaeny, Dunst addressed what it was like to act with her partner, especially since she had to embody such a disturbing character.
“I feel like Lee's approach in this scene is: We just have to get through this and come out alive,” Dunst says. “So he wasn't afraid of it as an actor. It's a strange question because Jesse and I fell in love creatively first as actors and how we work together. And we love that process.”
Dunst continues, “I'm going to be very honest: Watching him play that role, I thought, 'Dang, my baby is killing this role.' That's how I felt. I was like, 'Damn, he's a good actor.' The scenario was very scary, but I wasn't afraid of it. But just looking at the mass grave, everything around me, was terrifying.”
However, filming the scene was unique for Dunst, unlike the rest of her co-stars. “The other actors and the way they responded to Jesse was scarier to me in terms of what was actually happening in the scene,” adds Dunst. “But I didn't interact with him in that scene either. Basically, he asked me where I'm from and I said, 'Colorado.' So it wasn't like he was doing things to me like he did to Cailee and the other characters in that scene, which was scary because the setting is scary.”
Cailee Spaeny, left, and Kirsten Dunst in the movie “Civil War.”
(A24)
Spaeny's experience on the scene was very different. Shooting for two days under the hot Atlanta sun began to take its toll. The film was shot chronologically, so the events of the film began to have a cumulative weight on the actors.
“Once we got to that scene, it was really scary,” Spaeny says, explaining that the first part of the scene focused on Dunst, Moura and Henderson planning a rescue from afar while she and Plemons were away from the others. “So I was there with Jesse for about half a day with him, completely in character, drilling me, improvising that whole scene.
“And when we got to the end of that scene, I think we were all really out of it. “You do it so many times and it just gets under your skin.”
Spaeny went on to explain that Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy had designed the scene so that there were no cameras visible, with Hardy hiding in the pit that must have been a mass grave.
“So you didn't see any of the crew wandering around in the background eating a bag of chips; you didn't have a traditional close-up,” Spaeny says. “It felt very immersive. That stunt sequence was incredible. And when we all got in that car, when Stephen comes and picks us up, God, he felt really real. That whole sequence. The scene, the way it's written is completely chilling. And then the performances around me, it was just that combination, doing it over and over again for two days straight. “It just affects you.”
Plemons was not Garland's first choice for the role. About a week before principal photography began, another actor cast in the role, whose name Garland declines to name, had to drop out. Garland remembers learning that he had lost the other actor while he was talking on the phone outside the rehearsal space where the cast was preparing.
“I was standing on the street when I got the call and I thought, 'Oh, shit. Now we are in trouble,'” says the director. “And then I went to rehearsal and said 'Bad news, guys, so-and-so can't do it.' And Kirsten said, 'What? You should ask Jesse. And I thought, Oh, that would be amazing.”
“Jesse was around,” Dunst says. “I thought, 'Let's get Jesse to play this role.'”
“It was a surprising stroke of good luck,” Garland says. “That makes it seem like I'm being disrespectful to the other actor. I'm not at all. It's just that the movie was very lucky to have Jesse.”
Stephen McKinley Henderson in the movie “Civil War.”
(Near Murray/A24)
The climactic moment of Plemons's scene, when he is taken away by a truck, is eliciting wildly disparate reactions. At the film's world premiere at South by Southwest, an audience in one theater applauded it while an audience in another theater sat in stunned silence.
As they continue, Sammy reveals that he has been shot. By the time they reach the relative safety of a Western Forces military camp, he is already dead. Later, Lee looks at his camera and sees a photo of Sammy's body slumped in the back seat of his vehicle. In a moment of charged tenderness, he erases it.
“We filmed that scene in a lot of different ways: I don't delete it, I delete it, I was crying, I wasn't crying,” Dunst recalls. “There were many different versions of that. And that's the version Alex wanted to tell about Lee's character. So the decision was made by me in the editing because we just made a lot of different choices.”
Dunst remembers working with the emotions of the moment. “He would put me in Lee's place,” he says. “If he was a mentor to me, if I was with them during his death, whatever that meant to me. But I think Lee's decision was to keep it in his memory. And she didn't need a photo. It will be a photo in her brain for the rest of her life.”
Kirsten Dunst in 'Civil War'
(Near Murray/A24)
In one of the first scenes of the film, one of the first pieces of advice Lee gives Jessie is to wear a helmet. And during a shootout early in the film, Dunst, Spaeny and Moura wear helmets. But they were never used again, not even during the climactic military attack on the White House.
“We're just saying we lost them,” Dunst explains with a knowing smile. “That was a great debate, believe me. And I don't know how much I should share, but basically, for film, we weren't totally sure if you wanted to see your characters throughout the movie wearing helmets.
Dunst says she thought she looked like Goldie Hawn in “Private Benjamin” when she wore her helmet. Spaeny had his own worries.
“You can’t see my eyes,” he says with a small laugh. “It's realism to the point you can't see my face.”
Part of what makes “Civil War” so powerful is how plausible it is, showing people rarely at their best, but more often at their worst, divided by self-interest and petty fears. The film's bracing sense of reality also generates deep concern for these journalists who are urgently heading toward danger, with or without helmets.
“That was a cinematic choice,” Dunst says. “I feel like everything else we try to make it as real as possible.”
