We may live in a movie dystopia of franchise malignance and CGI everything-everywhere, but rest assured, there’s always the reverse flank rising, the DIY no-budge Luddites intent on making it all small and keeping it all real, and this week the van-life winner is Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, a resolute anti-blockbuster that dares to de-escalate the Civil War movie. Not to be confused with the other The Damned, released here this year (Thordur Palsson’s rather grotty Brit-Icelandic folk horror), Minervini’s film almost strives to damn itself, by being an ascetic exercise in elision, nearly plotless, shot in the Montana scrublands without a written script.
It’s a beautiful, meditative thing, beginning with the camera lingering over a pack of wolves ripping at a dead deer — the natural laws are in effect. Minervini has up to now been an immersive documentarian, and his film has the spontaneous, intimate, and inevitably undramatic vibe of you-are-there nonfiction, as it trails after a troop of Union soldiers heading west to secure the frontier. From whom or what, we’re never told, and when the ambushes happen, we never see an adversary, just their muzzle flashes.
The attentional void encourages stray thinking — as in, can you, or should you, be making an apolitical film about the Civil War?
In the meantime, the nameless soldiers — a ginger-beard cynic, two idealistic young brothers with a devout prayer-spitting father, a savvy firearms expert — do a lot of what they would’ve actually done, had a camera been hanging around recording them in 1864: waiting, scanning the landscape, pitching tents, fiddling with their guns (which all look clean and newish, as they should), washing in streams, respectfully chitchatting about their paper-thin reasons for signing up, field dressing a shot buffalo, wiping down the horses. Minervini cast mostly nonprofessional actors, some from the Montana National Guard, and his strategy from top to bottom is to hone in on the often uneventful quotidian, and let the actionful cliches of war movies go suck it.
It’s not hard to respect the posture. Sometimes, the idle sotte voce conversations have the ring of a Terrence Malick movie, and in fact, the spontaneous dialogue might be the film’s least realistic ingredient — Minervini opts neither for full-blown period dialect nor entirely anachronistic modern speech, and the vague in-betweenness struck me as odd, perhaps because the movie is so purposefully emptied of anything else. We’re to focus only on the grit, the light, the landscape, the worry that something might be happening over the next hill. As a doc-maker, Minervini likes to eyeball the reality he finds as semifictional, but he doesn’t like to push, or reorganize. Shot in sequence, The Damned has the same draggy, shrugging observational personality as a report from an embedded photojournalist — your squashed anticipation of story or outcome is part of the point.
Subtractionism can be a seductive and principled mode, but what is often stripped out is what movies are commonly made of: motivated story tropes, character context, narrative satisfactions, cause-and-effect connectivity. Minervini’s lovely, pensive odyssey has some fascinating moments — the hunt for distant buffalo (focus-impaired and thus convincing), the abrupt cut to a camp after an off-camera slaughter, one lone tied-up horse trying to get free in the snow. (The horse acting in general is superb.) But with all the downtime, the film ends up feeling a little empty, and again, that attentional void encourages stray thinking — as in, can you, or should you, be making an apolitical film about the Civil War? In Alex Garland’s recent pop-culture experiment Warfare, politics are elided in favor of raw terror, as if it were merely unnecessary background chatter. But for Minervini, politics is just another complexity left out of the recipe; at the very least, something the film would’ve needed a script and more experienced actors to express.
Given the small-boned and proscriptive essence of what The Damned is, and not what it isn’t, one can also be a little disheartened by the flush of FX credits in the ending roll call — presumably for the buffalo, or the wolves. There’s even a rotoscoper. It’s getting so you can’t even trust an ultrarealist these days. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.