"This bloated, rotting carcass of an empire is driven not by reason and hope, but by fear, hatred and ignorance."
"It says here you basically ran the Leave campaign, and yet... and yet, I doubt most people have ever heard of you."
Brexit: The Uncivil War (simply Brexit in the US and other countries) is a 2019 drama by James Graham, focusing on the role of Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.
Brexit: The Uncivil War features examples of:
- 0% Approval Rating:
- Nobody who works with Cummings trully likes him, the euroskeptic tories hate him in fact. But some appreciate his methods because they are effective.
- Cummings's data shows Farage to be a paradoxical case. He can become more popular, but everytime he does, the pro-Leave position also becomes more unpopular with the general public. Because of this, Cummings considers him toxic and refuses to join campaigns.
- Aside Glance: After the Leave vote wins, Cummings glances directly into the camera.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: How the Leave side wins, constantly making outlandish claims and then moving on while the Remain side spins its wheels proving them wrong.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The movie makes no attempt to portray the Leave campaign as anything but ill-intentioned and dishonorable in its methods. And in case you have been living under a rock, they win.
- Batman Gambit: When Farage and Banks try to persuade Cummings to join forces with their campaign, Cummings is even more antagonistic than usual, provoking them to storm off. It's revealed soon afterwards that he's counting on them doing the heavy lifting with the genuine racists and isolationists, thus allowing his campaign to be more "respectable" and target a different voter base. He acknowledges it as a risky strategy, but it pays off.
- The Beautiful Elite: After some twenty minutes dealing exclusively with pro-Leave figures, Cummings introduces the pro-Remain side as this, and they are indeed more beautiful and better groomed than the sometimes grotesque people behind Leave.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Cummings and Oliver's meeting ends with Cummings gloating that he has introduced a new form of political discourse that the Westminster elite won't be able to control... to which Oliver replies that Cummings won't be able to control either.
- Blatant Lies: Most notably the infamous "£350m a week" written on the side of the big red bus, as well as claiming that Turkey would be joining the EU.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Cummings begins the film looking and speaking directly to the audience.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Cummings is prone to scribbling his notes on walls and locking himself in a closet to sit on a cardboard box when working.
- Celebrity Paradox: Matthew Elliot references The Avengers to Douglas Carswell, who doesn't understand the reference. Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Dominic Cummings, also plays Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which features the Avengers as prominent characters.
- Contrived Coincidence: At one point, Cummings tries to get onto the subway but arrives just as it takes off. It turns out that Oliver happens to be on the other side of the tracks, setting up a scene where they go to a pub for drinks and try to talk out their grievances. Had Cummings arrived at the station a few seconds earlier and got on the train, it's highly possible that he might've never even spotted Oliver.
- Demoted to Extra: David Cameron had a large part in the first draft, but was almost Adapted Out. Oliver acts as the face of Westminster and the Remain tories in the final film.
- The Ditz: Leave spokesmen Michael Gove and Boris Johnson are portrayed as comically stupid. In a press interview, Gove stammers his way through responses to basic questions until Johnson provides a distraction. For his own part, Johnson can't help but start blabbing about all the inaccuracies in his campaign's statements about Turkey when caught off guard.
- The Dreaded: While Cummings names four members of the pro-Remain side to watch out, they only consider Cummings himself as a threat, mostly because he is unpredictable.
- Dude, Not Funny!:
- David Cameron makes a joke on a conference call of how catastrophic it will be if the Vote Leave campaign succeeds. He follows up with, "Too soon?" after silence.
- The pro-Leave tories don't like it when Cummings attacks Cameron in a magazine and almost make him resign over it.
- Dying Town: Jaywick, only because enough inhabitants remain to keep it from becoming a Ghost Town, as in real life.
- End of an Age: Oliver tells Cummings that he's unleashed a new era in the way political campaigns are run, which he sees as for the worse; "it's uncivil, it's unsophisticated, and worst of all, it's unkind."
- Enemy Mine: Both Leave and Remain campaigns have tories and labourists working together. Only UKIP is solidly for Leave and the Lib-Dems solidly for Remain.
- "Eureka!" Moment: While up late at night reading a book in preparation for the birth of his child, Cummings reads lines about how new fathers feel a need to take back control, and realizes the Leave slogan needs to be "Let's take back control", since potential Leave voters feel they have lost it.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While "evil" is definitely stretching it, Cummings is not a nice person at all and resorts to various shady methods to turn the vote for Brexit in his party's favor. However, he's shown to love his wife Mary and eagerly anticipates the birth of their child.
- Everyone Has Standards: The murder of Jo Cox horrifies everyone on all sides, and Cummings is clearly disgusted when Farage's victory speech seems to have forgotten her.
- The Faceless: Steve Bannon has a brief cameo where he is only seen in shadows and from behind.
- Flyover Country: A key part of Cummings' strategy is targeting Britain's equivalent of flyover country, the poorest working-class neighborhoods that are all but ignored by other political campaigns. The Leave leaders personally visit the dying village of Jaywick to interview the locals.
- Foil: Oliver to Cummings. Cummings is an abrasive, pseudo-intellectual that is loathed by the establishment and focused on appealing to people's hearts rather than their heads. Oliver is part of the Prime Minister's staff, is respected, and wants to model the campaign on reason appealing to people's heads.
- Follow the Leader: In-universe, UKIP makes its own purple bus after the other Leave campaign's red bus and drive past it in an attempt to get more attention.
- Framing Device: See Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee below.
- Friendly Enemies: Played with: in a scene written for the film, Oliver invites Cummings out for a drink after their chance encounter at the Moorsgate tube station. They manage to be civil, but there is still a degree of sincere and profound disgust for what they each represent; Oliver being seen as the complacent, arrogant elite who is convinced he knows what's best for people while being completely out-of-touch with what ordinary voters really care about, and Cummings being an anarchist who's undermining the very concepts of expertise, objective facts and sophisticated discussions, while replacing it with crude, slogan-shouting subjectivism.
- Golden Mean Fallacy: Craig Oliver complains that the television studios are giving Leave's rambling nobodies equal footing with Remain's esteemed professionals.
- Gone Horribly Right: Some on the Leave side have this reaction when their victory becomes clear. In the Framing Device, future!Cummings is also seen to be very unhappy with how the success of his campaign has made political tribalism and incompetence even worse.
- Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: The framing narrative has Cummings explaining himself, or trying to, before a fictional future hearing of the Information Commission. At the end he walks out.note
- Historical Domain Character: Every named character is based on a real person, although the history only goes three years back.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: One of the few criticisms made about the film is that it depicts Douglas Carswell as being ignorant of Jaywick's situation despite being in his constituency, with Cummings directly addressing him over it. In reality, Carswell had been to the area as MP and was in a local campaign against TV companies depicting Jaywick in a negative light. This involvement in local issues was directly credited with allowing him to successfully cross party lines and become UKIP's only MP (though the fact that UKIP also refused to field a candidate against the euroskeptic Carswell while he was in the Conservative Party likely helped as much).
- Hollywood Old: Michael Gove (born 1967) played by Oliver Maltman (1976), and moreso Boris Johnson (1964), who is played by Richard Goulding (1981). Averted with Benedict Cumberbatch (1976) as Dominic Cummings (1971); they simply just don't look alike.
- Invisible President: Downplayed Trope. PM David Cameron is identified by name and appears in Stock Footage, but is otherwise only featured as a voice provided by actor Mark Dexter.
- It's All About Me: Despite coming up with the most outrageous attacks on the European Union, Cummings never actually voices his own opinion on it or Brexit. All he wants is total control over the Leave campaign, then to win at any cost and consequence. His vague claims that he intends the Leave victory to be a "reset" of British politics appears to be just an excuse to avenge his resentment for having been expelled from Westminster in the past.
- It Will Never Catch On: The old pro-Leave figures don't have faith on Cummings or his methods to win.
- Lack of Empathy: On the eve of the vote things in the Remain focus group heat up, with an elderly woman supporting Leave attempting to explain her troubles and reasons for supporting the issue, only for a glued-to-her-phone Millennial sitting beside her to dismiss her concerns by callously declaring that she'd "already lived [her] life" and, thus, should have little to say on the matter. Cue a complete emotional breakdown by the elderly woman as she elaborates on her grievances, and a realization from the Remain coordinators that they're very possibly in serious trouble.
- Lowest Common Denominator: In-universe, Cummings refuses to discuss traditional Leave talking points like immigration, bureaucracy, and EU institutions for being too complex for the general public, preferring soundbites and simple concepts like "cost" and "control".
- The Man Behind the Man: Robert Mercer is noted to have provided substantial contributions to the Leave vote as well as to the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. It is heavily implied that he was simply using Britain as a test-case for an approach that could put Trump in power later.
- Manipulative Bastard: Cummings, despite his apparent lack of social skills, is seemingly capable of convincing anyone of anything at anytime. He manages to convince John Mills, his main rival in the Leave campaign, to resign when Mills wants Cummings to resign. And he does it on the fly.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Late in the campaign, after the focus group goes disastrously wrong following Oliver's backfired attempt to correct everyone's misconceptions, he realizes that the tendency of British politicians to blame the EU for anything and everything they couldn't accomplish is now coming back to bite them hard.
- The murder of Jo Cox also prompts some soul-searching from the Leavers, as they consider to what extent their approach stirred up violent people. Cummings himself, though horrified by it, concludes that his campaign only "exposed" the ugliness and division already present in British society, rather than causing any of it.
- Never My Fault: Cummings washes his hands of the colossal mess that Brexit has become after spearheading its passage.
- No Name Given: The man and woman interviewing Cummings in 2020 are simply credited as "male consultant" and "female consultant".
- Noodle Incident: Cummings has some troubled past history with Westminster politics and Oliver in particular, but it is never elaborated on.
- No-Sell: Cummings is seemingly unimpressed with everybody.
- Nostalgia Filter: Discussed. Cummings notes how people have a rose-colored impression of how things used to be, so he paints the narrative of leaving the EU not as a new change, but as a return to the way things used to be. This is fully realized when he changes the slogan from "take control" to "take back control."
- "Not So Different" Remark: Massingham claims that the rightwing Leave's targeted advertising is but a progression of the methods used by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign. Because of this, he doesn't consider it a Left vs Right thing but Old vs New, and Donald Trump's campaign is implicitly set up as the next step in the ladder.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Boris Johnson. Even more disheveled-looking than Cummings and with a characteristically dorky voice and gait, he is introduced while Michael Gove looks down on him during an opera, with Johnson seemingly lost. However, during their first political act for the Leave campaign, it is Gove who can't handle the pressure and freezes on the face of a simple question from a journalist, and Johnson who quickly saves the day by providing a distraction with a non-sequitur about puppies. He also questions if they can legally use the NHS logo for a political campaign as soon as he sees the infamous Red Bus, but slides into support when neither Cummings nor Gove listen to the (implied) criticism.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Leave campaign.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Cummings makes a speech about why referendums are terrible mechanisms to make policy decisions (they are divisive and reduce complex issues to binary choices, among other things) to John Mills, who considers the coming referendum his lifetime achievement and mistrusts Cummings's online-based campaign plan. He gives another, direct dress down when Mills tries to bully Cummings into resigning, which Cummings is able to turn against and make Mills resign instead.
- Refusal of the Call: Cummings turns down Carswell and Elliott's first proposal to lead the Vote Leave campaign, but agrees when Carswell promises him full control. Elliott himself is repeatedly told to take the reins and front of the Leave campaign, but he argues he's not cut for the role unlike Cummings.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The whole plot, to the point that Cummings's portrayal as an unknown figure made the film dated in just one year. In particular, James Graham decided to start writing when Jo Cox was murdered, one week before the Brexit referendum happened.
- Room Full of Crazy: Cummings works out the themes of the Leave campaign, the original "take control" slogan, by writing a large Venn-ish sort of diagram on the back wall of his office.
- Rule of Symbolism: The Tube tracks that divide Cummings and Oliver when they first see each other on the night after Jo Cox was killed.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the first scenes features Matthew Elliot quoting "Avengers, assemble!" Douglas Carswell admits that he doesn't get the reference.
- Craig Oliver disputes the reputation of Dominic Cummings as a brilliant sage, saying "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty... fucking asshole."
- Sixth Ranger: Cummings himself is a newcomer to the Leave campaign, as is Zack Massingham of AggregateIQ (who isn't even British, but Canadian), Michael Gove and Boris Johnson (whose stance on Brexit is introduced as "?" rather than "Leave" or "Remain" like other characters). Eventually the key to Leave victory is playing this on a nationwide scale: Both sides decide that Leave and Remain voters have their minds made on the issue, so they ignore them, and Cummings in particular bets on finding and convincing people who don't vote at all otherwise to vote Leave.
- Stiff Upper Lip: Cummings's ability to keep himself cool and appear in control is best exemplified in the scene where he is almost asked to resign from the Leave campaign. He realizes he's sweating in fear, but pulls out the sweat in a way his interlocutors don't realize it, then argues his case and convinces them to stay and make his main critic resign instead.
- Those Two Guys: Arron Banks and Nigel Farage, later superseeded by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Both couples are portrayed as out-of-touch elitists, yet vulgar at the same time, and at a loss when trying to keep pace with Cummings's machinations.
- Title Drop: In a downplayed variant, at one point Cummings' tactics are called out as "uncivil" and that they have set a precedent to make British political tribalism worse.
- Villain Protagonist: The film is written by a left-wing Europhile, centering on the actions of right-wing Eurosceptics.
- We ARE Struggling Together: A lot of the drama is between Vote Leave and Leave.EU for primacy as the official campaign in the referendum. On the Remain side, the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties are rather reluctant to work together.
- While You Were in Diapers: Cummings gets told this two times in quick succession in the beginning. First by John Mills, who wants to work the pro-Leave campaign like an old-school, door-to-door political campaign, and then by Nigel Farage. Both say that they have been working for Leave their whole life and that Cummings is a newcomer; both fail to impress him.
- Wild Card: Cummings is referred to as "an egotist with a wrecking ball" by Oliver, shortly followed by a grudging admission that this does make him rather unpredictable. Cummings' own (nominal) bosses find this out too, when they attempt to fire him for this reason, and he simply texts all his staff to resign immediately and gut the campaign, ignoring the bosses' spluttering that it's his patriotic duty to convince them to stay.
- Arguably subverted by the time the film ends however, as (a) the unexpected Leave victory proved Cummings correct in the way he handled the campaign, and (b) he does seem genuinely committed to his belief that the established political class need to be shaken out of their complacency. His testimony in the Framing Device also suggests that what he actually wanted was to "hit the reset button" and stop the shortsighted tribalism of Conservative vs Labour vs Lib Dem etc., and is sincerely disgusted that it's gotten even worse.
- Worthy Opponent: Averted. Cummings loathes the Remain campaigners as snobby establishment elites. See above for Oliver's utter contempt for Cummings. Though one of the Labour members of the campaign does have some admiration for the effectiveness of the Leave Campaign's methods.
- Xanatos Speed Chess: Cummings' speciality, best shown when the directors of the Leave campaign, exasperated by his antics, ambush him with a jump-before-you're-pushed "request" to resign. His quick thinking and veneer of calm to their outrage sees him retain his position and his main opponent resign instead, with nobody quite able to work out what just happened.
- Ultimately, Leave's victory is shown to be because of this; in the digital age, Cummings' better grasp of social media and recruitment of AggregateIQ and their algorithms that can modify and target adverts to specific people in real time gives him an edge that Oliver's conventional approach can't match, and makes the Attack! Attack! Attack! method mentioned above far more effective.
