Jesse Plemons’ Civil War character says the quiet part out loud

Jesse Plemons is a brilliant actor. He’s also one of our most memeable stars. It’s not that he’s super expressive; on the contrary. He is usually quite calm and almost hesitant in his line deliveries. He takes his time. But whether he plays a timid man The power of the dog or season 2 of Fargo or a sturdy police officer Judas and the Black Messiah or Game night, there’s always something going on behind his narrowed, watchful eyes. His silence, his pauses and his clear, unvarnished way of speaking act like a force of gravity that pulls the camera and other actors into its orbit. He is also, in a quiet way, extremely funny.

A still image of Plemons in his ten gallon Stetson in Killers of the Flower Moon, who stands motionless in the doorway of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s home, has become an internet shorthand for calmly and rightly calling out bullshit. “I was sent from Washington DC to investigate these murders.” “See how they are doing?” (A small pause, just long enough to be noticed.) “Look who’s doing it.”

That scene was used the trailer of the movie, and Plemons’ masterful deadpan brought it to life. Less than a year later he was at it again the first trailer for Alex Garland Civil war, with another pause and another matter-of-fact line, which lingered in the mind even longer than Garland’s stark, button-pushing images of war-torn America. Plemons wears military gear and bright red sunglasses with red lenses and holds a rifle as he interrogates the film’s journalist heroes. “There’s a misunderstanding here,” says Wagner Moura’s character Joel. “We’re American, okay?”

“Okay,” Plemons says, taking a moment to scratch his stubbly cheek. “What friendly of American, are you?”

The entire scene has much the same impact on the final film, and the question of Plemons’ unnamed character looms over the entire enterprise long after the credits have rolled. For me, this was the moment when Garland’s expertly crafted, suspenseful, yet somewhat restrained film finally bared its teeth.

Civil war has received some criticism for failing to clearly articulate the root causes of the conflict it portrays, or for eating the cake by combining a political stance with deliberately provocative imagery. I am not going to litigate the case for or against here. Garland has laid out his reasoning for approaching the story this way very clearly in interviews, and the polarized reactions to the film often say more about its viewers than it does about the film.

Civil war is essentially a road movie that follows a team of journalists on a dangerous odyssey to meet America’s fascist president before he is overthrown by an alliance of independently minded states. As the devastated landscape passes by, Garland stages a series Apocalypse now-like vignettes that underline the surreal horrors of war and raise questions about the role reporting plays in society: torture at a gas station, summary executions after an intense gunfight, a strangely peaceful town ruled by a vigilant militia. At every stage he is careful not to name a party or throw political ideas into the mix.

This also applies to the Plemons scene to some extent. The scene takes place a little after the halfway point; photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and Bohai, another reporter, are separated from their friends and captured by Plemons’ small militia team. The soldiers – it is not clear which faction they belong to – dump a truck full of bodies in a mass grave. Joel, Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Tony (Nelson Lee) get closer to negotiate the release of their friends. As the opener, Plemons’ character shoots Bohai dead. Then he asks his question.

On a simple level, the scene works so well because it gives us a clear villain – perhaps the only one in the film – played by a great, charismatic actor. That has always been one of the purest pleasures of cinema. Plemones, which was cast just a week before filming after another actor drops out is extremely threatening without breaking the muted, realistic tone of the film. His red sunglasses – a true stroke of genius from the costume department – ​​give him an iconic pop on screen. The scene is shocking and suspenseful and kicks an already gripping film into high gear. It’s also a dramatic fulcrum for most of the film’s characters, none of whom are the same afterward.

But this is also the first and perhaps only moment Civil war when the disturbing subtext about our current times sears to the surface. “What kind of American are you?” Is Plemons asking which side of the conflict the reporters belong to, or something else? Joel senses the danger in the question and answers that he is from Florida. “Hmm, one centrally American,” Plemons answers doubtfully. Lee and Jessie are from the Midwestern states, so they get a pass. It is no coincidence that they are also white. “That’s American.” Tony, crying in fear, admits he is from Hong Kong, and is immediately shot in the head.

It’s racism; it always comes back to racism. With the truck and the ditch full of conspicuously non-white bodies in the background, Garland points out that the evil of ethnic cleansing almost always follows war. But the implications of Plemons’ interrogation are even broader and more terrifying than that. While he accepts Lee and Jessie’s legacy, he also mocks them for their rootless detachment from it. When a terrified Jessie admits that she doesn’t know why they call her home state of Missouri the “Show-Me State,” Plemons responds with a chilling bark of derisive laughter. (The question was improvised; Spaeny is really from Missouri and really don’t know why people call it that.)

When he asks “what kind of American,” Plemons’ character isn’t just insinuating about race. He asks a fundamental question of identity: how do you experience your Americanness, and how deeply are you rooted in it? An answer that is not entirely convincing will not pass the test. In this scene, and in this scene alone, Garland gets to the heart of the matter: the terrifying, polarized essentialism that can drive a country to tear itself apart, and that’s all too easy to spot at this point. All its menace and horror are contained in one of Jesse Plemons’ little pauses.