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Hits close to home: Rachel Lopez reviews A Private War
A biopic based on a Vanity Fair profile of celebrated war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012, looks at the futility and human price of war.
Looks like Hollywood’s quietly vowed to put out at least one true-events film about journalists every year. Spotlight took the Best Picture Oscar in 2015. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot saw the funny side of covering war in 2016. The Post made it to The American Film Institute’s top 10 films of last year.
A Private War goes further in all senses of the term. It spans the last decade in the life of Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike), the firebrand American war correspondent at the UK’s The Sunday Times, and the many prices she paid before she was killed in an attack in Syria in 2012.
The bravery is made evident early on. Colvin heads to Sri Lanka in 2001 to report on the Tamil rebels and loses an eye in a grenade attack, wearing her trademark eyepatch from then on.
There are assignments to Libya (and a plum interview with Muammar Gaddafi), hard-won scoops about buried prisoners of war in Iraq, hard drinking in Kabul’s bars after a bloody day in the field.
Bravery turns to bravado. Director Matthew Heineman overlaps war scenes on to Colvin’s London home to mirror her panicked inability to distinguish reality from horrific memory. Relationships break down, friendships fray. Alcoholism , nightmares, and post-traumatic stress disorder take over despite sanatorium breaks. And egged on by an editor (Tom Hollander) who sees her as a “prize pig”, Colvin soldiers on, as wars get messier, journalists are imperiled further and her obsession with reporting overrides her sense of self-preservation.
Bits of the real Colvin seep into Pike’s warts-and-all portrayal. A voiceover from an interview goes past the ever-haunted look in that one good eye, the tears she fights back, and Colvin’s twitchy discomfort with parties back home. There are dusty war scenes and a heroine’s mental isolation much like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. But Heineman keeps Colvin flawed as much as fearless. So the climax, as Colvin risks detection by doing live broadcasts from a bombed-out city, shows not just the human cost of the war but the human cost of covering it.
The Syrian war is now in its eighth year. At least 43 journalists have been killed on the job globally this year alone. In one voiceover, Colvin worries if “enough people will care when your story finally reaches them”. A Times editor acknowledges that Colvin’s story is “pretty grim for the Sunday front page”. It’s pretty grim for the multiplex too. It’s up to the viewer to not shy away.
