Goings On: Alex Garland and Park Chan-wook Reckon with America

Kirsten Dunst in “Civil War.” | Photograph courtesy A24

Between the A.I. drama “Ex Machina”and the pandemic-based horror movie“28 Days Later,”the writer-director Alex Garland has made something of a name for himself as a chronicler of worst-case scenarios. (Whether these scenarios are always persuasive is a separate question. “28 Days Later,” which was directed by Danny Boyle and launched the career of a young Cillian Murphy, is a masterpiece;“Men,”a solo Garland venture from 2022, is not.) His latest film,“Civil War,”apes the iconography of the Capitol riot to construct another dismal future—one in which tensions between the states have reduced the U.S. to a conflict zone. The blockbuster proved divisive long before it opened in theatres this week: when the first teaser dropped, in December, liberal commentators questioned its politics even as right-wing conspiracy theorists declared it “predictive programming” by the deep state. The film itself—which follows a quartet of war correspondents who set out to reach D.C. in time for a rumored assault by secessionists—is as much of a Rorschach test as the trailer was. Garland opens in a ruined New York City and leaves it to viewers to fill in the blanks of how we got to this point. His visuals for the ensuing road trip are provocative, and his fluency with action yields genuine suspense, but the protagonists are little more than archetypes with conveniently old-school philosophies of journalism. For Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a hardened war photographer, simply bearing witness is the be-all-end-all. “We don’t ask,” she tells a rookie. “We record so other people ask.” Garland, too, is more than ready to supply the images. But he’d rather not dwell on their implications.

Park Chan-wookis an auteur more willing to put his thumb on the scale—and his new adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel“The Sympathizer”offers another kind of reckoning with America. The series, premièring Sunday on HBO, centers on a man known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese spy embedded with a South Vietnamese general (Toan Le) first in Saigon just before its fall, then in nineteen-seventies L.A., where he continues to monitor the displaced military leader and begins to build a new life. The Americans who come into the Captain’s orbit—a cynical C.I.A. operative, a leering “Oriental studies” professor, a swaggering director with Altmanish aspirations—are equally eager to use him for their own ends. Park doesn’t shy away from the horrors of combat, but, in contrast to the vérité style of “Civil War,” the series is surprisingly playful both structurally and aesthetically, with Robert Downey, Jr., playing four different roles (sometimes in the same scene) and the Captain reversing his own narrative more than once as the story unfolds. Eventually, he ends up on what the general calls his “Hollywood mission,” attempting to inject meaning and dignity into an “Apocalypse Now”-style Vietnam War movie. It’s thankless work—but the exiles are acutely aware that culture can also be a battleground.

Photographs courtesy the artist

Art

Take it from a critic who never likedChristopher Wooland maybe still doesn’t: “See Stop Run,” the artist’s largest exhibition in ten years, should be visited by everybody with an appetite for aesthetic adventure and without a fear of heights or barbed wire. Situated on the previously abandoned nineteenth floor of a downtown high-rise, it is the opposite of Wool’s last big show, at the Guggenheim—there are zero word paintings but plentiful photographs of infrastructure, a mosaic of pink and black scribbles, and wire sculptures that look like scribbles made 3-D. By far the most striking thing is the nineteenth floor itself in all its uncarpeted, crumbly-walled, filthy-ceilinged majesty. You don’t feast your eyes on Wool’s recent work; you sharpen them and see the decayed afresh.—Jackson Arn(101 Greenwich St., entrance on Rector St.; through July 31.)

Opera

Nadia Boulanger is arguably the twentieth century’s most influential pedagogue, having taught such composers as Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, and Quincy Jones, but her sole opera,“La Ville Morte,”written with the pianist and teacher Raoul Pugno, was never performed in her lifetime. France’s entry into the First World War, in 1914, derailed the première, and the full score was lost. With a soft-spoken yet unsettling sensuality akin to Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” the opera takes place at an archeological dig in the ancient city of Mycenae, where a young woman is the victim of others’ unseemly desires and fascinations.Catapult Opera,in its own act of excavation, puts on the work’s American première in a reconstruction of the orchestration overseen by Boulanger’s student David Conte.—Oussama Zahr(N.Y.U. Skirball; April 19-21.)

Movies

“The People’s Joker,”directed by and starring Vera Drew, is a sharp-edged parody of Batman’s superheroic universe, and of comedy itself, incarnated by the Caped Crusader’s sardonic nemesis. The exuberantly D.I.Y. movie, set in a dystopian future, is steeped in Bat-lore, but Drew builds a personal story on the basis of fantasy: a small-town childhood, the anguish of gender dysphoria, the move to Gotham City, the struggle to become a comedian, and the discovery of artistic success—in the persona of Joker the Harlequin—by way of her trans identity. Drew brings this wild but intimate vision to life by way of outrageous antics, lacerating dialogue, and a blend of live action with phantasmagorically janky effects and animation. She opens new dimensions in superhero cinema and in the art of uninhibited (and unauthorized) adaptation.—Richard Brody(In theatrical release.)

Ballet

New York City Ballet’sspring season, part of its expansive seventy-fifth-anniversary celebrations, starts with an all-Balanchine program, a chance to catch the playful and seldom-performed “Bourrée Fantasque,” set to the music of Chabrier, from 1949. The immensely satisfying “Dances at a Gathering” (1969), an emotionally redolent Jerome Robbins work set to Chopin piano pieces, receives six performances. In the final week, Balanchine’s magical evening-length précis of Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1962), fills the stage with magical beings, amorous fools, and fireflies. More recent works include Christopher Wheeldon’s moody pas de deux to Max Richter and Clyde Otis, “This Bitter Earth” (2012), and William Forsythe’s sharp, stylish “Herman Schmerman (Pas de Deux)” (1993). And on May 2, the company unveils two brand-new ballets, one by Justin Peck—the creator, most recently, of the dancical “Illinoise”—and the other by the immensely versatile choreographer Amy Hall Garner.—Marina Harss(David H. Koch Theatre; April 23-June 2.)