A Private War
(USA/UK, 110 min.)
Dir. Matthew Heineman, Writ. Arash Amel
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander,
Stanley Tucci
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| Rosamund Pike stars as Marie Colvin in A Private War |
There is a war going on. It doesn’t have bullets. It doesn’t
have bombs. It doesn’t have drones. Instead, this war is one of words, access,
and angles.
Colvin, played by Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike in a
committed and emotionally charged performance, reminds her editor Sean Ryan
(Tom Holland) of the sacrifices a journalist makes while chasing stories on the
front lines. “I see it so you don’t have to,” she asserts after years covering
the atrocities of war for the foreign correspondence desk of London’s Sunday Times. This tense exchange sees
Colvin fire back at anyone who judges a journalist like herself from behind the
comfort of a desk. How can one scoff at or belittle a person who inches closer
and closer to death, putting herself in the line of fire to interview people
escaping the bullets or searching for loved ones?
A Private War shadows
Colvin as she enters one conflict after another. In Sri Lanka, she goes deep
into the jungle to score an exclusive interview with a Tamil leader and put
news of a genocide on the front page.
The dangers of the job are immediately evident in this thrilling sequence that
sees Colvin wade through the bush with armed fighters. They encounter
resistance and, when Colvin puts her hands in the air to show that she means no
harm and identifies herself as a journalist, her opponents fire a rocket in her
direction.
Colvin loses sight in her left eye following the incident,
but the attack doesn’t sway her. True to the adage that “an eye for an eye
leaves the whole world blind,” the narrow escape implores Colvin to open as
many eyes as she can. She cranks out a massive feature that exposes the crimes
of her assailants to the world.
The brush with death makes her stronger, as the urgency of
her reportage becomes part of her blood. She dons an eyepatch to cover her
mangled eye and wears it as a badge of honour. The eyepatch fuels a few
good-natured pirate jokes to convey Colvin’s relatable personality, but sight
becomes a running metaphor throughout the film as Marie refuses to turn an eye
when wilful blindness runs rampant throughout the world. She goes to the
frontlines again and again, scooping interviews with leaders like Libyan
dictator Muammar Gaddafi and propelling significant human rights crises onto
the global stage.
The film doesn’t fall into a hagiographic portrait of Colvin
as it shows her pursue stories with reckless abandon. A ballsy stop at a
checkpoint in Iraq sees Colvin endanger the lives of her guide and
photographer, Paul Conroy (played in an impressive Jamie Dornan), by fibbing to
armed guards that she’s a humanitarian. In a sense, she is.
Colvin flashes her gym card and takes advantage of the
guard’s poor English. The ruse nearly gets her killed, but it also lets her
enter dangerous territory and unearth a mass grave. There’s a method to her
madness and A Private War puts
audiences within the mind of a woman who thinks like a spy and acts like a
humanitarian, combining a mighty heart with the crippling responsibilities that
come with encountering violence day by day.
The time on the frontlines takes its toll on Colvin, who
struggles with PTSD and alcoholism. There is a war going on within Marie Colvin
as she tries to reconcile the horrors she sees with her thirst to tell more
stories. Recurring nightmares about a young girl with her wrists slashed, for
example, plague Colvin with the inevitable fact that she cannot save every life.
As played terrifically by Pike and realized in this tough and timely dramatic
debut from documentary director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, City of Ghosts),
Colvin is a compelling eye through which to see global conflict. Pike has an
uncanny ability to use her body to convey a character’s anguish, as Colvin’s
stiffened neck and ever-expressive hands reveal a woman burdened with the moral
weight of her occupation and the anxiety it breeds. Partly stripped of an
actor’s greatest asset—her eyes—Pike remains ever expressive with her frazzled
her and frayed nerves performing double duty. Colvin’s exhaustion and her
determination are evident in every frame as she self-medicates with alcohol,
and thrives on the rush of being in a conflict zone. When Colvin is safest on
the streets on London, Pike looks as if she’s going through withdrawal.
Heineman draws upon his own journalistic rigour from
documentary filmmaking and provides an all-encompassing view of the hell Colvin
encounters. There are subtle details, like a severed limb strewn carefully in
the corner of the frame as Colvin surveys the aftermath of a bombing, with
which Heineman conveys the pervasiveness of death. Heineman and DP Bob
Richardson provide an immersive view that is intimate yet expansive as Colvin
gets close to the nitty gritty details she needs to see to tell the full
picture. The bombed-out hell of Syria is an exceptionally heart-stopping feat
as Heineman recreates the remains of Homs with jarring realism.
A Private War
builds to Colvin’s final story, and perhaps her most significant one, as the
drama leads to the devastation of Homs in the Syrian Civil War. Title cards
flag the proximity of Colvin’s story by noting “X Years to Homs” with each
milestone. The final act of A Private War
is absolutely devastating as Colvin and Conroy gather evidence that shows
the world that they’re being lied to and that countless Syrian civilians are
being slaughtered. Colvin trudges through the remains of Homs and witnesses a
city that has been annihilated by senseless warfare.
There’s a change in Colvin when she arrives in Homs and
Pike’s emotional investment in her character asks audiences how one can remain
an objective observer to such horror. However, A Private War reminds us that the story’s always better when the
writer cares. We need more soldiers like Marie Colvin now more than ever.
A Private War opens Nov. 16 in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal and
expands the following week.
