August 3, 2024

My Mia Culpa

It's all in the perspective

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

I've already written over three thousand words on Alex Garland’s Civil War, yet here I am writing another essay inspired by the movie. Specifically, I need to verbalize my apology to Kirsten Dunst for how I initially missed the true depth and greatness of her performance in this movie. The usual suspects, once we’ve rounded them up, were, of course, preconceived notions and assumptions, and unconscious bias.

Chances are that I was introduced to Dunst through her absolutely stunning performance as Claudia in the Interview with the Vampire, which was quickly followed with solid performances in Little Women (1994) and Jumanji (1995). Regardless or perhaps because of the performances in these movies as a child actor, I have always perceived Dunst as part of the wave of promising stars who for the most part never lived up to the promise of their respective early performances. This cohort includes in no particular order, Mena Suvari1, Jessica Alba, Reece Witherspoon, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Natalie Portman2. More than anyone else though, Anna Paquin3, in my mind, was a perfect career parallel to Dunst - starting not just with a bang but an Oscar for her role in Piano, just a year after the Interview with the Vampire, followed by a detour into the X-men franchise and a slew of “straight-to-DVD” movies broken up by a successful six year run leading the cliche vamprotica True Blood series4. Which is eerily similar to Dunst’s own career arc that saw her jump-start two franchises in Bring It On and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. While a whole lot of the films that Dunst was in in the early 2000s were either very forgettable (Mona Lisa Smiles) or quite cliche (Wimbledon) or both (Elizabethtown), she squeezed in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and while personally I have a long list of issues with Marie Antoinette, I know it was fairly well received5. In the midst of all those, Dunst also contributed to what I believe to be one of the five worst movies I have ever seen - Levity (hard to fathom considering the talent involved).

Since those days, with the exception of Melancholia I can’t remember anything that I’ve seen Dunst in until her sudden exceedingly amazing performance in the Power of the Dog a couple of years ago. Thinking back, I probably had mentally written her off along with many other former child actors whose adult careers did not live up to the original promise of their childhood success. While Marie Claire may think that most child stars become successful adult actors, the reality is much more bleak. The very nature of the entertainment industry creates a toxic environment for any person, but especially for a young mind exposed to the fame, unrealistic expectation, privilege, idolization, etc. There are plenty of tragic examples of young actors from Corey Heim, Brittany Murphy and River Phoenix dying entirely too young, to Elijah Wood, Corey Feldman and others being sexually abused, to Natalie Portman, Milla Jovovich and many others being overly-sexualized (yes, often as children!), to those like Macauley Culkin, Drew Barrymore, Brooke Shields and many, many others whose parents famously exploited their work and essentially them. Judy Garland is probably the most infamous example and soon we’ll be able to enjoy (?) a movie about it. Is it any wonder that so many end up with the “Child Star Syndrome?”

The term Child Star or Actor Syndrome is often used in media to describe adults who grew up through a childhood of acting and now they struggle with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues as a result of the scrutiny they lived under during those critical years of development. The constant demand for perfection leads child actors to throw away their innocence without ever even having a chance to develop proper mental techniques to deal with the expectations, demands and stress, not to mention abuse and exploitation. As child stars age, they are often faced with rejection, objectification and a sense of burnout that can turn many away from the industry in its entirety. By the time they are adults they are experiencing full fledged PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, which is essentially what Child Star Syndrome really is. Many child actors leave the industry before the age of 30 often struggling to separate themselves from public perception of them. Is it any wonder then that so many who survive the grind and remain in the industry rarely live up to the lofty expectations of their childhood promise; is it any wonder that so many end up playing the same character over and over because they simply lack the emotional and/or mental capacity to do anything else6?

Dunst has been quite public and open about her own struggle with mental health, especially depression as the result of her own experiences as a child star actor. Working on her mental health was a transformative experience, she said. "You become a different person; you grow up.” It is something that I can relate to and deeply understand on a deeply personal level. Perhaps this growing up is also what transformed her performances. In the Power of the Dog, Dunst’s incredible performance that for me came out of literally nowhere after decades of essentially cliche drivel and I assumed it was due to the directing ability7 of Jane Campion, rather than Dunst’s own growth and development8. When I watched Civil War for the first time, I thought that it was more of the same, the usual cliche Dunst with the emotional range of stoned sloth. Once I started to write my review of the movie, though, I immediately felt that I missed something in the way she depicted Lee Smith, a famous war photographer, yes just like the actual famous war photographer Lee Miller, Garland even spells it out through Jessie in the NYC hotel scene. Dunst face, that seems all “matter-of-fact” and “tough-as-nails” and any other cliches you may want to rattle around, displays these tiny glimpses of kindness and generosity and the full emotional depth we’ll experience later in the movie. Here, in this scene, it’s incredibly subtle - all of that depth is hidden behind the tired weariness and can only be seen in the way Dunst’s eyes react to Jessie’s words or the very corners of her mouth as she keeps her poker face on.

Lee has plenty of reasons to be tired, weary and jaded. Dunst perfectly delivers the line that she dedicated her life, putting herself at constant risk, to ensure that her homeland does not repeat the mistakes that Lee has documented across the world as one authoritarian regime after another came to power and one civil strife turned into a war after another and yet, here she is in the middle of a road trip from hell through the landscape of a perfect surreal Americana. The closer Lee and her team gets to DC, the more the tensions escalate in the movie and the more we realise that Lee’s steely jaded persona is just a facade that is crumbling as quickly as the United States depicted in the movie.

In a certain way, Lee’s character development is the exact opposite of Jessie’s who declares after an especially harrowing scene “I’ve never been scared like that before, and I’ve never felt more alive,” and ends up being the one to emotionlessly film Lee as she falls down after being shot. We never learn why either of them decided to become journalists and specifically war photojournalists; they only have a couple of in-depth conversations and in one of them, speaking essentially as equals they talk about cameras, highlighting that the more experienced Lee is all digital, while the younger, naive and wide-eyed Jessie shoots using the old-school film. Dunst perfectly delivers the line that only one out of roughly 30 pictures will be worth saving, which is a stark contrast to her earlier “we record so other people ask.” Yet later, she silently contemplates the image of Sammy’s body, slumped in the driver’s seat, a sheet of his blood spread out across the side of the truck on the screen of her camera sitting in her hotel room. In the end, she decides to delete it.

Tasha Robinson is on point here:

Like so much in Civil War, this moment never gets a big expository speech where Lee reveals what she’s thinking. It’s entirely likely that different viewers will see radically different motives in the moment. (Which is fine; Garland says he prefers to let people get whatever they want out of his movies.) Is Lee offering her friend some final dignity by not passing on an image of his corpse to her news agency, Reuters, and turning it into a product to sell? Or is she just showing, once again, that she’s tired of war, tired of death, tired of being a witness to atrocity on other people’s behalf? Does she delete the picture for her own sake, because she doesn’t want to ever have to look at Sammy’s body again? And if so, is it because she’s guilty about the brutal things she said to him before the trip began, or guilty because she survived and he didn’t? Or is it something else entirely? The specifics are up to your interpretation.

What’s clear and unequivocal about the moment, though, is that Lee effectively chooses to edit the national record of the war, erasing this one image and ensuring that it’s something the future will never see. Sammy will be buried, the truck will be cleaned, and for most people, life will move on. Lee’s job is to capture this kind of moment so it won’t be forgotten, so other people in other places can understand and experience the war and its costs. But she decides, in the moment, whether from guilt or respect or exhaustion, to remove Sammy’s death from the record. The moment shows how much power journalists have to shape a story, and how their responsibility may be divided between what they want for their audience and what they want for their subjects. It’s also a powerful touch of character-building, where Lee exerts control over the narrative for her own private reasons.

So much for “we don’t ask…” but delivered in such a nuanced and yet poignant way by Dunst. Her depiction of Lee gradually enables us to see through the haggard and desolate facade and see the real depth of her character’s weariness and sorrow, so profoundly inconsolable that Sammy muses that Lee lost her faith in the power of journalism and perhaps if we watch Dunst closely enough, she has indeed lost her faith in more than journalism…

For many years I have had a theory that middling actors have a potential to make great directors because in order to achieve even an average performance they have to pay very close attention to every detail and over time they get the right perspective which they then can apply when they get behind the proverbial camera. Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Jon Favreau and Clint Eastwood are all perfect examples of such a phenomenon. Perhaps, there is a parallel to actors struggling with PTSD who manage to get help like Dunst did? Help that focuses on a person’s mental health but also provides the same or similar perspective necessary to enable the shift from average to great in the transition from an actor to a director. In my mind, that’s what enabled Dunst to tap into all that talent that she displayed from very early on.

Potentially, for the movie to truly be as cathartic as it has been, at least for me, it desperately needed Kirsten Dunst to provide a remarkable performance turning her depiction of Lee into a deeply human and very relatable tour-de-force in the final set piece of the movie. Her [SPOILERS] death is poetic, both as a eulogy to journalism and democracy9 and as a perfect ending to the transformative journey that changed her and perhaps will change us.

Is that too much to ask?

Lee died just as she was finally born, Dunst did a great job displaying the evolution for us. Will we ask the right questions so that Lee’s death is not meaningless?