Wagner Moura – Movie Musings

Dark political drama, with a surreally multi-layered construction, challenging but rewarding

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Cast: Wagner Moura (Armando Solimões), Carlos Francisco (Senior Alexandre), Tânia Maria (Dona Sebastiana), Robério Diógenes (Euclides), Gabriel Leone (Bobbi Borba), Roney Villela (Augusto Borba), Kaiony Venâncio (Vilmar), Maria Fernanda Cândido (Elza), Thomás Aquino (Valdemar), Udo Kier (Hans)

For decades, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship which controlled the country with a brutal, often hidden, hand, spinning a web of tall stories and mythologising to hide its ruthlessness and corruption. This forms the backdrop of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s dark shaggy-dog story of the ‘mischief’ (as the film puts it) of this terrible time, where truth was a hostage of fortune and violence and death could be dealt out at any time by corrupt forces and their accomplices in law enforcement.

In 1977, Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) arrives in Recife during carnival season under the name of Marcelo. It slowly becomes clear he is a former university professor of engineering, on the run from a contract on his life taken out by the corrupt businessman appointed to run his department. In Recife, Armando hides out at a refuge run by former anarcho-communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) and reconnects with his son Marcelo who is being raised by Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), father of Armando’s murdered wife Fátima (Alica Carvalho). A sympathetic contact lands him a role in the police records office, giving Armando opportunity to search for the file of his mother, a woman ‘disappeared’ and murdered by the junta. Meanwhile, two hitmen Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and Augusto (Roney Villela), hunt him down.

Mendonça’s film is put together with the moody leanness of a 1970s conspiracy thriller, mixed with the portmanteau scope of Altman. In its muted colours it has a grim sense that unseen forces watching around every corner. At the same time, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, presenting events in Brazil from a range of perspectives, from the casually corrupt police, to campaigners for justice, to the smorgasbord of refugees in Dona Sebastiana’s commune, including Ghanian immigrants and a persecuted female dentist. These events move smoothly, sometimes with surreal touches and moments of black comedy, with Mendonça not letting us forget that in a country as ill-organised and idiosyncratic as this one, bizarre events and brutal killings are everyday events.

An idea of the sort of country Brazil is, is established from the start, with the film’s atmospheric, tense and darkly funny opening, set in a country-side gas-station. On the forecourt, under a piece of cardboard, lies a slowly rotting corpse of an attempted shoplifter, shot several days ago. When Armando stops for petrol, he’s told the authorities have been informed but have dragged their heels about collecting the body. At which point the police arrive… but have no interest in the body (from which, wild dogs need to be constantly chased away from) instead intimidating Armando, attempting to extract a bribe (he hands over his cigarettes) before disappearing over the horizon. As Armando drives away, the dogs return.

That’s Brazil, it seems, in a nutshell. As well as being expertly filmed, acted and staged, that opening captures the entire mood of black, hopeless, humour in a perfect fusion of Altman and Leone. The more we see of the authorities, the more it confirms our impression of them as greedy, useless bullies interested only in puffing their own position and slapping down anyone who looks like a lefty troublemaker.

The leading cops at the station Armando works at are lazy, racist egotists who idolise a German tailor, played in a fine cameo by Udo Kier, they think is a Nazi war veteran (oblivious to the fact he is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who despises them) and don’t think twice about tossing the bodies of internees into the sea. A severed leg, discovered in the belly of a shark by a marine biologist, is just such a victim – and the cursory (and, for them, unnecessary) attempts to identify this leg’s owner (and to dispose of it a second time) forms another darkly comic thread to the film.

This leg becomes, itself, the centre of the sort of absurdist fantasia that the authorities use to hide their own brutality. In Mendonça’s Carpenter-esque scene of bizarro body horror, we watch a staging of the media’s own report that a series of brutal beatings of gay men in a public park was carried out by this leg (as opposed to, obviously, the police). The police are, of course, fully clued up about the real cause of any violence, just as they have no problem palling around with the cashiered military officers who are now working as private hitman – and are happy to give them tips to their target.

In all this dark corruption, any splash of hope is welcome. Much of this comes from Wagner Moura’s toweringly committed performance as Armando, full of world-weary frustration and bubbling resentment at injustice and a desperate commitment to try and pluck escape from this life of fear. Moura’s Armando is a man of quiet reserve, decency and goodness who has had to become hardened to the circumstances he is in – who finds himself full of rage in a way he never dreamed possible. He carries burdens of grief and guilt at the loss of his wife (unaffected by his father-in-law’s correct suspicions that he was not always faithful) and his attempt to gain details about his mother from the labyrinthine police records he works among gives him some sort of hope of inner peace.

Testimony and the struggle for truth becomes a key theme in The Secret Agent which suddenly surprises us to a flash-forward framing device that shows a modern-day research volunteer transcribing recorded audio conversations between Armando and his resistance group contacts. The truth remains as elusive today as it does in Armando’s time: events unclear to the researchers are clearer to us (as we can see them not just hear them), but many mysteries and questions remain hazy today, with memories and half-truths often the only answers we have.

This is reflected as well in the film’s structure, which drip feeds information slowly. It’s nearly two thirds into the film, until Armando’s full background is made clear, and several events early in the film are only explained into any form of coherent sense by the context provided much later. This can make The Secret Agent a challenging watch: it’s a film that can slip through your fingers as easily as an eel. But it’s reflective of a country where reality itself is hard to grasp: where people can disappear without trace, life can end out of nowhere from an officially sanctioned bullet on the street, your entire life story can be altered by the press and tall tales reported as gospel.

Through it all, The Secret Agent is perhaps striking because (despite its title) it has no espionage in it at all. Only the desperate wading through a swamp of secrets and lies with no clear answers, where truth and humanity can be easily lost. The fact it manages to do this while not losing a dark wit – and powered by Moura’s deeply humane performance – is a testament to Mendonça’s graceful direction, which in its simplicity makes a lasting impression of a world where truth and reality are as much in flux as peace and justice.

An eye-catching concept disguises a film more about journalistic ethics than politics

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Kirsten Dunst (Lee Smith), Wagner Moura (Joel), Cailee Spaeny (Jessie Cullen), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Sammy), Nick Offerman (President of the United States), Sonoya Mizuno (Anya), Jefferson White (Dave), Nelson Lee (Tony), Evan Lai (Bohai), Jesse Plemons (Militant)

A third-term President (Nick Offerman) speaks to an America torn apart by Civil War. It’s an attention-grabbing opening but actually, in many ways, politics is not the primary focus of Civil War. Rather than a state-of-the-nation piece, Garland’s punchy work is a study of journalism ethics. Should journalists have any moral restraint around the news they report? Civil War covers the final days of its fictional civil war, as four journalists – celebrated photo-journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and would-be war photography who idealises Lee, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – travel to Washington in the hopes of capturing the photo (and interview) with the President before his defeat.

Perhaps worried about accusations of political bias, Civil War keeps the causes of its war – and, often, even which sides we are interacting with at any given moment – deliberately vague. There is a throwaway reference to Lee having gained fame for a photo of “the Antifa massacre”, phrasing which doesn’t tell us if Antifa were victims or perpetrators. California and Texas – unlikely bedfellows to say the least – have allied to form the Western Federation. We learn nothing about the President, other than casual name-checks comparing him to Gaddafi (he does vaguely resemble vocally, in his brief appearances, Trump). But so universal are the politics of Civil War it could, without changing a thing (other than wifi access) be as easily set in the time of Clinton or Reagan as Trump and Biden.

Instead, Garland’s point seems to be more if there was a civil war in the Land of the Free, the chaos we could expect to see would be no different than the chaos that has occurred in any number of other locations. On their journey, the journalists encounter UN-run refugee camps, lynch mobs, summary executions, street-by-street fighting, mass graves of civilians and a collapse of anything resembling normal life. We’ve seen the same sort of images countless times on TV, and it matters not a jot that the backdrop now are the streets of DC rather than, say, Mogadishu.

Instead, Civil War becomes the sort of ethical discussion you could imagine in a journalism school seminar. Lee is plagued with troubling memories of conflicts passed, where we see her photographing at intimate range, war crimes, atrocities and shootings without a flicker of emotion. It doesn’t take long for the viewer to find this passive observation of death uncomfortable. It’s something I already felt, watching Lee in the film’s opening photograph a riot over a water truck, camera clicking mere centimetres from civilians laid low by truncheons. When an explosion occurs, her first instinct (after pushing Jessie down to avoid the blast) is to reach for her camera, not to help.

Although showing journalists as brave – putting themselves in harm’s way to bring the readers and viewers at home the truth – Civil War subtly questions the profession of war reporter, people often excitedly pounding the streets alongside killers. Lee’s mentoring of Jessie seems focused less on camera skills, and more on drilling into her the need to disconnect with the world around her. To see herself an observer, whose duty is to record events not to intercede. This boils down to a central idea that Civil War will repeat: if I was killed, Jessie asks, would Lee take the photo? This question becomes the dark heart of Civil War.

We increasingly realise many of the journalists are adrenalin junkies, hooked on the buzz from following in soldier immediate footsteps. “What a rush!” screams Joel after they drive away from a battle that ended with a series of summary executions. Many of the journalists don’t consider they hold any moral connection at all for what happens in front of them. It never occurs to them to attempt to prevent an act of violence or argue against something they see. You start to get the chilling feeling that some of them would as unprotestingly followed the Wehrmacht through the Eastern Front and recorded mass executions with the same emotional disconnection.

The journalists also have a cast-iron belief in their own inviolability, believing the simple waving of their press badge will be guarantee them safety. This delusion is seriously shaken by an encounter with a terrifying, mass-grave filling soldier played by a dead-eyed chill by Jesse Plemons. Even in the tragic aftermath of this, Joel’s grief at the loss of friends and colleagues is also tinged with regret that their potential missing of a crucial story means it was also all for nothing.

Only Lee – an excellently subtle performance by Kirsten Dunst, with the flowering of doubt and regret behind her eyes growing in every scene – shows any growing sense of the ghastly moral compromises (and even collaboration with the grisly things they witness) the journalists have made. It makes an excellent contrast with the increasingly gung-ho and risk-taking Jessie (an equally fine Cailee Spaeny), who becomes as hooked on the adrenalin rush of combat as Joel is.

Garland explores all this rather well under his flashy eye-catching concept. The film is shot with a grimy, visceral intensity – punctuated frequently with black-and-white freeze frames showing Lee and Jessie’s photos, which reaches a heart-wrenching climax for one pivotal scene. Interestingly it’s the dialogue and plotting that sometimes lets Civil War down: its character arcs verge on the predictable and the characters have a tendency to fill themselves in on events with on-the-nose journalism speak.

Civil War culminates in a well-staged gun battle towards the White House in Washington that, like much of Civil War’s America-based concept is about the shock of seeing these things “happening here” rather than in a land far away “of which we know nothing”. But this teasing of a political comment disguises the film’s real intent, a careful study of the moral complexities of reporting horrors rather than stopping them, of becoming so deadened to violence a friend’s death becomes a photo op. Civil War might be one of the most subtle questioning of journalistic ethics ever made, presenting it not as an unquestionably noble profession but one of moral compromise and dark excitement-by-proxy at death and slaughter.