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A PRIVATE WAR
Director: Matthew Heineman Cast: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Faye Marsay, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Stanley Tucci, Corey Johnson MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:50 Release Date: 11/2/18 (limited); 11/9/18 (wider); 11/16/18 (wide) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 15, 2018 In A Private War, we don't learn too much about Marie Colvin, the renowned war correspondent who was killed in 2012 while covering the ongoing civil war in Syria. Everything we do learn from the film likely could be deduced through the knowledge of her job and imply by looking by a picture of her at any time after 2001. In April of that year, she lost sight in her left eye while covering a civil war in Sri Lanka. Such an injury, caused by an explosion from a rocket-propelled grenade, might have stopped a lesser person. Instead, Colvin kept traveling to conflict-affected locations until her death—wearing an eyepatch that only someone of her grit and determination could pull off. In a way, it's disappointing that we don't learn much more about Colvin through this dramatization of the last 11 years of her life. Looking at the general thrust of Colvin's life, though, do we really need to know much more about her? Here's a film that presents its subject as she was, without any attempt to soften her, to lionize her, or, in any other way, to turn her into someone she was not. In a lengthy monologue, the fictional version of Colvin lists a series of contradictions about herself, but the film actually shows them at work, too. She was tough, yes, but even someone as strong as her could not travel to war zone after war zone without having the experiences affect her in some way. She was determined, too, but that also meant that she could be reckless. She was devoted to her job, but that doesn't mean she evaded other parts of her life—friendships, romances or sex, parties, and other things. Those other aspects of life simply were tougher for her, partly because of her personality and mostly because of her job. It's possible for a person to be certain of what she's doing in life, to think that things could have been different, and still to possess little to no regret about the choices that led her to her current existence. It's simple enough to say that a film honors its subject and to treat that as the end of a discussion about it. One easily could say and do that about this film, considering its primary focus on Colvin's career and its extraordinary performance from Rosamund Pike, who captures the voice, the essence, and what must have been the assorted burdens of her real-life counterpart. At the film's start, Arash Amel's screenplay (based on the Vanity Fair article "Marie Colvin's Private War" by Marie Brenner) uses Colvin's own words, from an interview in which she says that feels as if she's dictating her own obituary, as a way to give us the basics of her journalistic philosophy. The most important way that the film honors her, then, is that it sees her life in the same way she saw her work. The key to her writing, she repeatedly says to her colleagues and interview subjects around the globe, is to show the human toll of war. She wants readers to care as much about these people as she does in seeing them first-hand. Amel and director Matthew Heineman want us to see Colvin's work, her personal struggles, and the effects of the various conflicts she covered with that same empathetic view. There's little about Marie's personal life in this version of her story. Her romantic and/or sexual affairs are either part of her doubts (an ex-husband, to whom she suggests they should try again and maybe have a child), her attempts to quiet the horrific memories of war (One montage juxtaposes sex with the writing process, with flashes of a recurring nightmare inserted between the two), or, through brief appearances by a character played by Stanley Tucci, the possibility of finding someone who supports her career. This is probably the way it should be, lest such matters get in the way of the heart of the character's nature. The central concentration is on Marie's war coverage, spanning across 11 years and skipping ahead from conflict to conflict during that period of time. It begins with the Sri Lankan Civil War, where Marie goes after convincing her long-time editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) that the war is being ignored by the media. She's injured there, after darting ahead of her armed escorts and attempting to get the Sri Lankan Army to stop shooting at her, leaving her blind in one eye. From there, it's to Iraq in 2003, where and when she ignores the shackles being placed on members of the embedded press. While there, she meets Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan), an Army veteran and freelance photographer, who becomes her professional partner until the moment of her death. Trips to report on conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, and, ultimately, Syria follow, and through all of it, the film splits its focus on Marie's maneuvers to find the story (often putting herself in harm's way) and on the actual subjects of her reporting. The people affected by these conflicts are given a voice here in a way that re-affirms Marie's outlook on the primary goal of her work. In between, there are scenes of Marie dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder (She denies the possibility at first, saying that only soldiers suffer from it) and alcoholism. The real power of Pike's performance isn't simply in her transformation into the character. It's also in how she subtly communicates the increasing toll on Marie's body, mind, and spirit as the years progress and as the conflicts continue raging. A Private War cares enough about Colvin to portray these struggles and to set them against the more significant perspective of war and its victims. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
disturbing violent images, language throughout, and brief
sexuality/nudity)
