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    ‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

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    In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Front, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film. That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“28 Days Later”), and then as a writer-director (“Ex Machina”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to D.C. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Severance,’ Adam Scott Gets to Work

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      The actor’s latest role is in another workplace series, but this one is more dystopian and involves elective brain surgery. Real-life parallels abound.“Severance,” an unnerving workplace drama, was originally scheduled to begin filming in March 2020, but pandemic shutdowns pushed the shoot to the fall. So in October 2020, Adam Scott, the show’s star, left his family in Los Angeles and flew to New York.For more than eight months, on the days when he could work — production paused a few times for positive tests, and Scott himself caught Covid-19 in February 2021 — he was driven to a busy studio in the South Bronx and surrounded by (shielded, masked) colleagues. Then he was driven back to a silent Tribeca apartment where he spent his nights alone, which made for an odd parallel with the show itself.“Severance,” which premieres its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on Feb. 18, takes a speculative approach to work-life balance. Scott plays Mark Scout, a department chief at Lumon Industries, a shadowy corporation. (When was the last time a TV show had a corporation that wasn’t?) Mark and his co-workers have each voluntarily undergone a surgical procedure known as severance, which creates a mental cordon so that your work self has no knowledge or memories of your home self and vice versa. Think of it as an N.D.A. For the soul.Scott, 48, hasn’t always had great balance. “My boundaries are all over the place,” he said. “I’ve often put far too much of my self-worth into whether I’m working or not and the perception of my work once I’ve done it. That’s unhealthy.” Living by himself, away from his wife and two children, grieving his mother who had died just before the pandemic, that balance didn’t get better.Scott in “Severance,” in which his character has a surgical procedure that creates a mental cordon between his memories of work and of home. The shoot was an oddly parallel experience.Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+Still, the job gave him a place to put those feelings. The role demands that he alternate between the guileless “innie” Mark, a vacant middle manager, and the dented “outtie” Mark, mourning his dead wife. Some scenes have the feel of a workplace comedy, a genre Scott knows intimately. (Imagine “Parks and Recreation,” where Scott spent six seasons, remade by Jean-Paul Sartre.)Others have the feel of a thriller, a drama, a sci-fi conjecture — all styles he is less familiar with. Ultimately, this dual role allows Scott to do what he does best: play a blandly handsome everydude while also showing the pain and shame and passion underlying that pose.“He has this understanding of how strange it is to be normal,” said Ben Stiller, an executive producer and director of the series. “There’s a normalcy to him, a regular guyness. He also has an awareness that there’s no real regular guy.”Scott has only ever wanted to be an actor. As a child in Santa Cruz, Calif., he watched as a film crew transformed his street into a set for a mini-series version of “East of Eden.” The road became dirt. The houses reverted to their Victorian origins. Horses and carriages drove past his lawn. This was magic, he thought, and he wanted to do whatever he could to enter what he called “that crazy magical make-believe world.”Whenever he had a moment alone (and as the youngest child of divorced parents, this was pretty often) he would imagine himself as the hero of his own movie — usually a Steven Spielberg movie. He acted throughout school, except for a year or two in high school when he worried what theater kid status would do to his popularity. But he was also a water polo player, so somehow it all worked out.Scott, 48, barely scraped by for years in pursuit of his acting dream until a role in the 2008 comedy “Step Brothers” changed his life. “I was hanging on by a piece of floss for 15 years,” he said. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHe enrolled in a two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. A classmate and fast friend, Paul Rudd, admired his work even then. “I’m like, this guy’s really funny,” Rudd remembered. “And dry and really bright, obviously.”Scott graduated at 20, made the rounds and spent a decade and a half booking just enough work to keep himself solvent — a few episodes here, a supporting part in a movie there — without ever feeling like he’d arrived.“I was hanging on by a piece of floss, for 15 years,” he said.In the early ’00s, his wife-to-be, Naomi Scott (then Naomi Sablan), asked him if he had a backup plan. “And it was so, so painful, his reaction to that,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘There is none.’”Then it happened. He landed a role in the 2008 Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy “Step Brothers” after another actor dropped out. Then he starred as Henry in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” replacing Rudd, who had other commitments. He missed out on a role on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” but the show’s creators brought him in at the end of the second season as Ben Wyatt, a love interest for Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. Suddenly, he had become a left-of-center leading man.In “Step Brothers,” he played a yuppie chucklehead, but the roles in “Party Down” and “Parks and Recreation” felt more personal. He brought those years of not making it to Henry, a would-be actor whose career has been deformed by a series of beer commercials, and to Ben, a strait-laced accountant with a disreputable past.Scott with Ken Marino, left, in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” in which Scott played a failing actor whose career was deformed by a series of beer commercials.Ron Batzdorff/Starz“I was like, oh, of course, I feel deeply all of these things,” Scott said, “Having been here for 15 years and not having a whole lot to show for it, and being a bit wounded by the circumstances of this town.”He loved the work. “His defining characteristic is that he just really wants to do a good job,” Michael Schur, a creator of “Parks and Recreation,” told me.But he didn’t love everything that came with it. “I started getting recognized, and it just felt completely different than I had imagined that feeling for those 15 or so years.” Scott said. “It felt more like I had a disease on my face than it did being recognized.”“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” he continued. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Scott was speaking on a video call from his Los Angeles home. The call had started a little late because he had spilled an espresso all over the table where his computer sat. The espresso had come from a top-line Italian contraption that takes a half-hour to warm up and that he cleans lovingly every night. If these sound like the habits of a man to whom the small stuff matters, maybe!Scott (with Nick Offerman, left, and Sam Elliott, right) starred in the hit NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation” for six seasons. “He has a powerful store of humility,” Offerman said.Colleen Hayes/NBCIn conversation, he was candid, self-critical, determinedly nice, without quite sacrificing the wryness that often defines him onscreen. He had shown up in the video window — in glasses, ghost pale, neckbearded — wearing a T-shirt and a sweatshirt underneath a flannel. A half-hour in, he took the flannel off.“Sorry, I just started sweating under your question,” he said. (The question: “What made ‘Party Down’ so great?”) He doesn’t love doing press, but he made it seem as if we had all the time in the world. He kept telling me how great I was doing.“He has a powerful store of humility,” Nick Offerman, his “Parks and Recreation” co-star, had told me. Offerman also said that what Scott does so well — onscreen, but maybe offscreen, too — is to embrace what he called, “a sort of geeky normalcy, the flavor of behavior that most people try to avoid if they can help it, because it’s too human.” (Offerman also told me to ask what Scott does to his hair to make it so voluminous, but Scott wasn’t talking.)Scott isn’t cool. Unapologetic in his fandom, he has even made a podcast about how much he loves U2. His enthusiasm for R.E.M. is legendary. Often his characters go a little too hard, want things a little too much. (Evidence? “The Comeback Kid,” a Season 4 episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which an out-of-work Ben takes a deep dive into Claymation. And calzones.)But several of his colleagues also identified a kind of reserve in him — a sense that he holds something back while performing, which makes the performance richer.“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” Scott said of becoming someone recognizable. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“There is something about the set of his eyes,” Schur said. “You just sense that there’s depth there, something that you can’t immediately access.”Poehler, Scott’s “Parks and Recreation” co-star, echoed this. “There’s a very internal, secret, secretive part of him as an actor,” she said.That tension makes him right for the linked roles of “Severance.” The try-hard part works for the “innie” Mark, a man who just wants to do a great job, no matter how bizarre the job is. And that reserve helps with “outtie” Mark, who spackles his pain with booze, jokes and distance.“It’s the same guy,” Scott explained. “It’s just one is more or less clean, and the other has lived many years and has gone through a lot of things.” Playing the “outtie” made him realize how much he had pushed away his own grief over his mother’s death. So that’s in there, too.It was a long shoot and, given the pandemic protocols, often a lonesome one. Some days were spent almost entirely within a windowless Lumon Industries room — all fluorescent light and plastic partitions and soul-crushing wall-to-wall carpet. “It definitely kind of drove me mad,” John Turturro, Scott’s co-star, told me.Scott put it more mildly. “It was a strange eight months,” he said.But he had a job, the only job he has ever wanted. So Scott, who has never held a real office job, showed up to the imitation office every day that a negative P.C.R. test permitted. He had work to do. More

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      in Music

      ‘Pam & Tommy’: A Story of Sex, Crimes and Videotape

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      A new Hulu series starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan is a picaresque romp through the history of the stolen sex tape that changed pop culture.Back when 1995 was young, Pamela Anderson and her new husband, Tommy Lee, the drummer for the flashy metal combo Mötley Crüe, were on top of the world. She was starring in the TV hit “Baywatch,” and while his band was past its 1980s prime, he could still live la vida rocka in their Malibu mansion.You can’t blame them for wanting to preserve some of their happiest moments — including some very naked, very sexual ones — for posterity, with the help of a Hi8 camcorder.And then, much to the couple’s dismay, the footage got out. And got around.Those events and their fallout are dramatized in the eight-part scripted series “Pam & Tommy,” a wild, picaresque romp through the nightclubs, palaces and porn dens of mid-90s Hollywood, which debuted Wednesday on Hulu. But the show has more on its mind than celebrity antics or period-perfect riffs on the outlandish trials and tribulations of its lead couple — although it has those, too.The series uses the scandal — which begot fortunes, ruined lives and made the celebrity sex tape a defining artifact of the internet age — as a guide through a transitional period in American culture. It depicts a time when glam gave way to grunge and when cheap video and dial-up modems exponentially expanded the reach — and the invasiveness — of the business of sexual imagery.“We’re still living in that today,” said D.V. DeVincentis (“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), a writer, executive producer and co-showrunner of the series. “You could argue it all comes from, if not this moment, then this period, and it’s something you’ll never get back in the bottle.”It is hard now to grasp the scope of the affair, which has become shrouded in a mist of 1990s nostalgia.“Obviously Pamela was so a part of everyone’s world, and even just that time in the ’90s is very sort of romanticized in my head — this wild time of crop tops and Spice Girls,” said Lily James, 32, who portrays Anderson in “Pam & Tommy.” “But we also talked about how there’s this deeper, untold story that was largely missed by the headlines.”A depiction of Anderson and Lee’s wedding (with Alberto Manquero, left) in “Pam & Tommy.” In real life, they met, fell in love and were married in the course of four days.Erin Simkin/HuluSeth Rogen, left, and Nick Offerman play the miffed contractor who stole the tape and the porn producer who helped him distribute it.  Kelsey McNeal/HuluSeth Rogen, 39, who is among the show’s executive producers, plays Rand Gauthier, the real-life electrician who stole, duplicated and distributed the tape. Rogen recalled by phone his first awareness of the footage. “I was 13, 14 years old when it came out, so I did not know the full story by any means,” he said. “I just knew it was this thing that was floating around my social group a little bit — that was looked on as this mythical thing, like ‘Lord of the Rings’ almost.”But how to tell such a story, with its obvious sex appeal, in a way that is entertaining but doesn’t add to the exploitation? (Anderson and Lee were not involved in the production.) It was a tricky proposition, especially since the truth is so fanciful that it might enhance the myth.Based closely on an eye-popping investigative Rolling Stone article from 2014, written by Amanda Chicago Lewis, the show takes off with the narrative equivalent of a Miata’s screeching tires. The man who sets the wheels in motion — and who, in early episodes, appears to be the show’s moral center — is Gauthier, the son of minor Hollywood royalty. (In 1975, his father, Dick Gautier, played Robin Hood in the short-lived Mel Brooks sitcom “When Things Were Rotten.” Rand modified his own last name’s spelling.)As depicted in “Pam & Tommy,” Gauthier was helping remodel Lee and Anderson’s mansion when he was fired, with money still owed by a capricious and stingy Lee (Sebastian Stan). Already out thousands of dollars, Gauthier returned to recover his tools, when, as Gauthier alleges in the article, Lee stuck a shotgun in his face. (Lee and Anderson declined to comment for the Rolling Stone article.)Incensed, he plotted an elaborate scheme to recoup his losses by stealing a six-foot-tall safe from Lee’s home, contents unknown. One of the show’s funniest scenes depicts Gauthier trying to fool Lee’s security camera by covering his back with a white pelt and getting down on all fours to look like Lee’s giant dog.“Because I’m involved in the show, people assume it was made up,” Rogen said, laughing.Lee had stored the precious video in that safe, alongside his guns and Anderson’s jewelry. The tape was out of sight and out of mind until early 1996, when the couple discovered that footage featuring their X-rated activities on a boat on Lake Mead had begun to surface publicly. Anderson and Lee, now the object of prurient attention, belatedly realized the tape had been stolen and were soon the butt of late-night jokes.James required four hours in the makeup chair daily and Stan three, many of them dedicated to the painstaking application of Lee’s many tattoos.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesIn a plot progression worthy of the Coen brothers, the caper metastasized, spreading into louche corners across North America. The real-life cast of characters grew to include bikers, gamblers, a brutal money lender named Butchie (Andrew Dice Clay) and assorted bottom feeders like Gauthier’s accomplice Milton Ingley (Nick Offerman), a pornographer in the San Fernando Valley.Bawdy touches accentuate the sleazy vibe of mid-90s Los Angeles, particularly in early episodes. In one scene, the famously well-endowed Lee discusses his love for Anderson with an animated version of his penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas). It is as funny as it is surreal, but it isn’t a flight of comic fancy on the screenwriters’ part: Such tête-à-têtes run throughout Lee’s 2004 memoir, “Tommyland.” (A spokesman for Hulu said the series’s dialogue is original.)Many times, such tricks are done with digital effects in postproduction, said Jason Collins, whose company, Autonomous FX, designed and built the many prosthetics used in the show. But Lee’s chatty member was brought to life by two puppeteers crouching out of camera range and armed with remote controls.“Doing it like this allows the director and the creators to feed lines to the puppeteers and to Sebastian,” Collins said, “so they can have maybe a little bit of extra improv and be a little bit looser on the scene that day.”As the episodes progress, viewers’ allegiances keep switching. Rogen, whose production company with Evan Goldberg, Point Grey, developed the series with Annapurna Pictures for Hulu, was drawn to Gauthier and his ambiguous role in the events.“I think you like him at first because he’s a simple dopey guy who is trying his best — you don’t think he’s doing anything that bad because he doesn’t think he’s doing anything that bad,” Rogen said.“The fact is that he truly didn’t consider anyone other than himself,” he added. “And he had a huge negative impact on people’s lives.”Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson had two children and were divorced in 1998, but they had an on-and-off relationship for many years after.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven Lee can be endearingly goofy, showering Anderson in affection and reveling in every rock-star cliché. But gradually, Anderson emerges as the story’s emotional and moral heart. And she is always a step ahead of most everybody around her, especially her husband, even as her instincts and intelligence are repeatedly ignored.“She’s ultimately our main character,” said Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”), the show’s creator and a co-showrunner. “She gets the worst of it from a career and a public-perception standpoint, but she certainly gets out of our show as the best person.”To that end, the show took measures, DeVincentis said, to underscore the vastly diverging ways in which Anderson and Lee lived through the events. Lewis, who wrote the Rolling Stone article, was a consultant for the series; two of the writers were women, and later episodes were directed by women, including Lake Bell, Gwyneth Horder-Payton and Hannah Fidell. (Craig Gillespie, who directed “I, Tonya,” directed the first three.)“These two people had the exact same experience on film, that film was shown to the world, but she was slut-shamed out of the business and he was saved from being a has-been and reinvented as a sort of sex god,” DeVincentis said. “The only difference between them was gender.”Some early reviews have accused “Pam & Tommy” of trying to have it both ways — to seek redress for Anderson’s humiliation while also capitalizing on the inherent sexiness of the subject. It tells the hidden story of a non-consensual leak, but it was made without Anderson’s consent. The sex and nudity are mostly matter-of-fact, but they’re hardly disguised.Citing anonymous sources close to Anderson, multiple news outlets, including Entertainment Tonight, US Weekly and The Sun, have reported that she is unhappy about the series. Producers said that they tried: Anderson declined multiple requests by the production to be involved with the series, a Hulu spokesman said. (Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)“We were constantly monitoring the fine balance of revealing how Pam was victimized while portraying people who lived rock ‘n’ roll lives,” the showrunners said in a follow-up email. “Everyone involved in making the show was in a near-constant dialogue about how our portrayal would thread that needle.”James, a British actress best known for parts in “Downton Abbey,” “Cinderella” and “Baby Driver,” said that her attempts to contact Anderson were unsuccessful. Siegel acknowledged that James was in some ways a counterintuitive choice for the role, but he had wanted to subvert expectations.“A lot of people assumed we would cast whoever the biggest bombshell is,” he said. “But one of the takeaways of the show is that Pam is not who you think she is, and we’ve all underestimated her. You’re misjudging Lily maybe the way you’re misjudging Pam.”Stan and James tried to contact their respective subjects, but only Stan succeeded. It made James “even more committed to giving my absolute all to play her authentically and do her justice,” she said. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesJames and Stan, 39, had to disappear into their characters. Both talked about having to lose weight and exercise steadily for their role. Stan acknowledged being somewhat intimidated by the drumming scenes, especially since Lee operated at a gonzo level of intensity. (Lee was not asked to participate in the series, but Stan talked with Lee, who Stan said seemed “very touched” that they had connected; Lee declined to comment for this article.)“You’ve got to remember he was a guy who would be playing upside down on a roller coaster,” he said, referring to something that routinely happened in concert. “You’ve got to have a lot of energy to handle that.”And then there were the lengthy makeup sessions: James required four hours daily; for his various adornments, Stan needed three, many of them dedicated to the painstaking application of Lee’s tattoos.“It’s pretty wild because Lily and I didn’t really see each other outside of those costumes until the end,” he said. “Even now, we see each other for press, and we’re like, ‘This is your hair?’”Both actors put those hours to use by watching countless YouTube videos and practicing their elocution. James’s task was further complicated by having to put on a different accent (Anderson was born in Canada) while wearing prosthetic choppers.In the end, getting the appearances right didn’t matter as much as getting the characters right. But if James couldn’t meet with Anderson in person, it only motivated her further.“I just was even more committed to my own research — even more committed to giving my absolute all to play her authentically and do her justice,” she said. More