Revealing true costs of telling war stories
A Private War
K (out of 4) Starring Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Stanley Tucci. Directed by Matthew Heineman. Opens Friday at Cineplex Yonge-Dundas. 110 minutes. 14A For many years now, Rosamund Pike has elevated nearly everything she’s in, often from the sidelines, whether as the beautiful, good-hearted Jane Bennet in Pride & Prejudice or the sublimely ditsy Helen in An
Education. Her work is so specific, so subtly on point regardless of its placement, that it registers almost subliminally. It’s only in the fullness of time that the viewer realizes it was Pike — not the nominal star — who was the best thing about the movie they’ve seen her in.
This isn’t to say that Pike hasn’t had her share of lead roles: She has delivered adept, alert performances in such high-profile projects as David Fincher’s Gone Girl, as well as in smaller roles. But A Private War is in another league altogether.
As the real-life war correspondent Marie Colvin, Pike erases every trace of her natural beauty to deliver the toughest, most uncompromising and vanityfree performance of her career.
A Private War begins in 2012, in the rubble of a building that has just been bombed by Syrian forces in the embattled city of Homs. This is where Colvin would meet her death, but the film quickly backtracks to earlier in her career, during which her fearless, swashbuckling temperament draws her to the world’s scorching hot spots.
We see her lose an eye covering the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, after which she affects an appropriately piratical eye patch. She chain-smokes, drinks far too much and embarks on a series of ill-fated love affairs, including one with her own ex-husband. At one point during A Private
War, Colvin invokes the Second World War correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whose courage and integrity she clearly wants to emulate.
But the strength of the movie — which is based on a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner — is that it doesn’t uncritically accept the comparison. Colvin is propelled by compassion and humanist concern, clearly; she seeks to make “suffering part of the record,” as she puts it. But she’s also driven by straight-up compulsion and an addictive personality at constant odds with her personal and professional judgment.
Directed by Matthew Heineman — best known for the urgent, timely documentaries
Cartel Land and City of Ghosts — A Private War is gratifyingly unfussy. Like its subject, it gets to the point, toggling between Colvin’s stints in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan with her wellheeled life in England. Eschewing fancy camera moves, Heineman handles the transitions gracefully, punctuating the action with shard-like montages of flashbacks and anxiety attacks that eventually send Colvin to rehab for posttraumatic stress.
It’s during this passage that Pike delivers the most bravura moment of A Private War, when she confesses her doubts and contradictions to her trusted photographer Paul Conroy, played in a gallantly self-effacing performance by Jamie Dornan. It’s a quiet, unforced moment — in which Colvin’s selfmythologizing bravado gives way to genuine doubt.
A Private War suffers from one or two clichés: Colvin actually delivers a solemn reminder that journalism is “the rough draft of history,” and a scene of one of her breakdowns, when she wanders desperately through her apartment and drinks vodka straight from the bottle, has the unconvincing air of an improv exercise. Such brief missteps aside, A Private
Wargains credibility and assurance as it plays, largely thanks to Pike’s inhabited portrayal.
To its credit, A Private War doesn’t shy away from disturbing questions raised by Colvin’s attraction to risk. As she seeks to banish her demons by engaging in increasingly reckless behaviour, it’s clear that she wasn’t just endangering herself, but the colleagues she hectored to go along with her.
By the time A Private War circles back to Homs, the film has made a strong case for the enormity of the loss of Colvin and Remi Ochlik, the photographer who died with her.
If viewers find themselves grieving and also questioning Colvin’s judgment, it’s because they’ve been given space to do so by a movie as tough and honest as its complicated protagonist.
A Private War gains credibility and assurance as it plays, largely thanks to Pike’s inhabited portrayal