The Damned is a Trojan horse critique of modern America.
Roberto Minervini’s The Damned is titled after Luchino Visconti’s awesome, harrowing 1969 epic about Nazi decadence, The Damned. Minervini is an Italian immigrant (not a “migrant,” as the media and politicians like to misname the illegal invaders) who arrived in the U.S. at age 30 in 2000 — during the Bush-Gore electoral conflict, he recalls. Since then, Minervini graduated from New York City’s socialist university The New School, eventually settling in Texas, where he chose native white locals as the subject of his semi-documentary filmmaking.
Minervini’s The Damned (European title: Les Damnés or I Dannati) uses its Civil War setting as a socialist’s critique of the Trump era. Its depressive redneck soldiers propose Millennial American decadence. So this is a Trojan horse movie, justifying demoralization from inside — self-destruction. The Damned premieres at this year’s New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
Following a small band of soldiers assigned to chart and protect Northwest borderlands, away from the East Coast battlefields, it details a pointless mission. Minervini himself seems unexcited by the new territory. Shooting on an ARRI Mini-LF with vintage Canon Rangefinder lenses, he avoids the fascination of Terrence Malick’s The New World. The opening scene of wolves feeding on a deer carcass evokes the atavistic start of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Later, soldiers kill, shear, and disembowel a horse.) Minervini is interested in the primeval aspects of American history — not the cultural force that John Huston captured in his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage.
This outsider’s perspective judges America’s past by the lights of a cynical, know-it-all. Minervini combines documentary realism with improvisation to find the adopted-homeland peculiarity he seeks. Beneath the desolate wilderness with lowering skies, these soldiers are not just quiet, but glum; they’re mostly mute with stolid, non-actor faces.
Inevitably, the soldiers, including a father and two sons, voice the grunt’s usual complaint and are told, “I think you end up realizing that your family’s a lot more important than your country.” Minervini abstracts our Civil War into the Blue fighting the distant, invisible Gray. Not knowing why the Civil War was fought (“The Army needed men, I needed a paycheck”), they sound post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan. After one brief mention of slavery, one soldier offers basic disillusionment: “There’s no principle behind what I’m doing here. I don’t care who wins.” The Damned could also be called The Defeated.
Eventually the soldiers wax profound: “Sometimes I don’t know what it’s like to be a man,” says a rookie. His mentor says, “I don’t see how God fits into this war. I don’t do anything in the service of God.” Minervini’s agnosticism matches his plain, quasi-doc images — relentlessly dull except when an elderly bearded sergeant watches rebel soldiers on horseback fill the horizon line, riding toward him. His closed eyes suggest a dream of surrender. The war looks empty, low-budget, the battle scenes disengaged.
Minervini defended his artsy process to Filmmaker magazine: “If I made a film about things that destroy the country, I would probably be seen as some sort of misanthrope. But because this is happening before my very eyes, I am convinced that this is not just a fringe movement.” He was referring to the militias depicted in his 2015 documentary, The Other Side, about Southern amphetamine addicts, absolving his lockstep, radical New School colleagues. Summarizing his critique of the U.S., Minervini averred, “I don’t know about civil war, but I know enough to think that America will continue to be at war with others and with itself.” That bitterness belongs to the trend of World Economic Forum movies such as Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), from 2016, and Alejandro González Iñáritu’s 2015 movie, The Revenant. The latter was an Obama western. The Damned is an Obama Civil War story, recalling Jeremiah Wright’s proclamation “God damn America!”
The Damned is a dark vision, bleaker than Spielberg’s Lincoln, matching Meek’s Cutoff and Ride with the Devil, but lacking the panoramic spectacle of The Revenant. Does this Civil War nihilism indicate how our current history will be rewritten? So that we no longer understand the complexities of the moment but let our experiences be chronicled by pessimistic, partisan historians?