FILM OF THE WEEK
A Private War
Cert: 15A. Selected cinemas
It’s testament to her dogged heroic determination that legendary Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin filed one of her stories from a Sri Lanka hospital bed after shrapnel had blinded her in one eye (hence her iconic eyepatch).
That some of the conflicts Colvin was covering still smoulder today gives this biopic from Matthew Heineman (his dramatic debut) a level of immediacy.
And yet, Colvin, quaking here via Rosamund Pike’s performance, seems of a different era in war journalism, one where satellite-phone signals were patchy and a world without the internet meant reporters had to bed-down in warzones until it was safe to contact Fleet Street with their copy. Two thumbs and a smartphone would’ve been the stuff of make-believe.
Based on a Vanity Fair article (Marie Colvin’s Private War) that ran following her death in February 2012 while covering the Siege of Homs, Heineman shoots this complex individual warts-and-all, balancing the heroism in the field with a conflagrant side fuelled by adrenaline, nicotine and danger. We see Colvin boozing hard and cavorting in bars and bedrooms, as much to decompress as to keep judders of PTSD at bay.
Between the eye-patch, American drawl and chain-smoking rakishness, Colvin is a real-life gun-slinger who befits a big-screen portrait. The horrors that she encountered in places such as Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and across the Arab Spring are not hidden from view, but segments of nightmarish PTSD hallucination sit awkwardly in the mix.
Jamie Dornan and Tom Hollander (as photographer Paul Conroy and editor Sean Ryan, respectively) provide support.