The Second
Civil War
(1997)
This satire
of a White House in crisis mode, as Ohio threatens cessation from the United
States, was originally to have been directed by Levinson. Who made the same
year’s intermittently effective Wag the
Dog. Intermittently effective also describes Joe Dante’s HBO movie, which offers
occasionally sharp and never-more-topical things to say about the buzz issues
of immigration, personal sovereignty and media manipulation yet finds itself
rather inert dramatically, when it needs to be propulsive.
It may be
that Dante was the wrong guy for the task, or simply that the means of making
this kind of media satire, nearly two decades on, now look rather antiquated.
Today such a script would be shot handheld, ever restless, caught in a
crescendo of events, a cross between The
Thick of It and 24. It would
certainly have disguised the budgetary restraints and made up for the manner in
which Martin Burke’s screenplay (co-writer of Top Secret!) has numerous targets but lacks a clear method for coalescing
them.
Dante
commented in an interview in Joe Dante
by Neil Baskar and Gabe Klinger, “every
time I see it, some different aspect of the movie is in the news”, adding
that everything that was wrong with the country is still wrong, if not more so.
The hot topic of immigration is central to the plot, as Idaho governor Jim
Farley (Beau Bridges) refuses to allow an influx of orphan refugees after India
drops a nuke in Pakistan. While the White House is in a state, calling in James
Coburn’s spin doctor Jack Buchan to smooth the less than sharp President’s
(Phil Hartman) tormented brow, Farley is more preoccupied with his ex
(Elizabeth Pena), a reporter of Mexican extraction.
In Burke’s
scenario, not exactly startlingly cynical behaviour includes moving immigrants
to states where they will vote for the President and, particularly amusingly,
adjusting the deadline for Idaho to re-open its borders to 67 ½ hours (from 72)
in order not to clash with an cliffhanger instalment of All My Children. The media’s influence looms large, with Dan
Hedaya’s news director at NN network manipulating the landing of the plane full
of orphans so it coincides primetime (agreed to by the Give to the Children
Corp charity rep; everyone is buyable, as the Sioux Nation allows the army to
cross their reservation in exchange for a casino next to Little Big Horn). In
the ultimate in arse-covering, Buchan allows the clash between the US Army and
the Idaho National Guard (which includes representatives from other National
Guard units) to play out rather than admitting he misheard the governor’s plan
to resign as an intention to secede from the US.
The casual
hypocrisy of Farley, having an affair with a child of immigrants and eating “the usual” – fajitas – for breakfast, isn’t
really that pointed, and the idea of a rather dopey president, in the light of
Reagan and Bush Jr, seems rather passé (“This President’s going to end up as confused as a goat on AstroTurf unless we are
careful”, warns Buchan, who habitually invokes past presidents so as to
stir his into action). That said, the late Hartman is as peerless as you’d
expect. James Earl Jones, as the voice of a bygone age of earnest reporting, is
appropriately sincere and authoritative, in an Edward R Murrow kind of way, but
the proceedings generally lack the weight his presence authorises.
Dante
commented “what I really like about the
picture is that there really aren’t any villains in it, that everybody has
their own reason for doing what they do and they think it’s for a good cause”;
they maybe wrongheaded but are never caricatures. Caricatures might have lent Second Civil War some bite though,
strange as that may seem. It’s only when the picture spirals into the horror of
open warfare and military firing squads that it attains this, and even then it
doesn’t feel tonally of-a-piece; indifference leads to incitement and back
again. There’s a fantastic scene where Joanna Cassidy’s anchorwoman Helena
Newman, aghast at what she has just witnessed, attempts to rouse Ben Masters’
co-anchor Matthew Langford from his teleprompted reportage, banging his head
against his desk while informing him “There
IS no other news!” It’s the closest the picture gets to Network-style indignation and
confrontation, and it needs more of it.
The best,
most consistent element, is Coburn’s spin doctor, “a political facilitator” rather than a lobbyist, gifted a stream of
memorable lines (“Dead supporters are the
worst. I mean, they take up a ton of your time, and then where the hell are
they when you need them?”) and brutal honesty about the election process
(the President won, like all do, “for the
sizzle, not the steak”; it’s only afterwards that “the poor bastards have to bite into fat and gristle”). He gets his
former president quotes from a pool of limo drivers (“Wow, that Eisenhower had a way with words”) and, only partially
joking, suggests that, in order to guarantee future voters, “What we do is take the Irish off birth
control”.
The movie
is littered with pointed observations and asides; the army is partially
immobilised because, following Free Trade talks, the US Stopped making parts. Then
later they stopped shipping parts. One of the militia members complains that
they don’t want foreign banks taking their money… Footage of various comparable
internal strifes is nixed by the network in favour of the last Rwandan massacre,
as they have no Rwandan advertisers who might be offended. But a lot more of Second Civil War just rather bumbles
along, and despite the galvanising presence of Dennis Leary, much of the on-the-ground
reporting is unadorned and unimaginative. An extended confrontation between
National Guard and US Army bigwigs, shown to be respectful but really flinging
abuse at each other, is actually quite tedious, and the attempts at showing
divisions of ethos in the newsroom (while ordering milk to go with a donut)
lack flair.
The shoot
went well for Dante, and he welcomed the fine cast (which includes repeat
players Hartman, Leary, Ron Perlman, Wiliam Schallert, Kevin McCarthy, Kevin
Dunn, Roger Corman, Robert Picardo, and, of course, Dick Miller, here as a cameraman).
Unfortunately, after underwhelming test screenings, HBO began pressing for
changes, leading to “my second most negative
experience making a film”. His post mortem: “In terms of how good I knew the film could have been, before all the
post-production meddling, the end result was very disappointing – more so than
any other movie I’d done since Explorers”.
He’s hard
on The Second Civil War then, and
hard too on the later Looney Tunes: Back in
Action, but unless there was something in there that gave it drive and
momentum (one might argue Back in Action
has too much of the those), I doubt the unexpurgated version was a lost
masterpiece. Dante may be better poised as a filmmaker to take aim at targets
indirectly, from the fringes of a plot, rather than making politics central to
his features. Certainly, that’s tended to work best for him in his career, and
as an exception The Second Civil War flourishes
fitfully but is cumulatively rather languorous.
