Depicting journalist’s costly ‘Private War’
War correspondent Marie Colvin fought not one but numerous personal battles in her violently abbreviated life, and director Matthew Heineman and star Rosamund Pike have joined forces to persuasively handle them all in the gripping, insightful “A Private War.” Colvin was the two-time winner of the British Foreign Journalist of the Year Award and something of a celebrity among her peers in the time before she was killed in Syria in 2012, and though some of her struggles can be surmised, they are still brutally involving. Perhaps inevitably, Colvin also had major battles with herself. Her work came at a steep personal price that included alcoholism and intense, disturbing bouts of PTSD that “A Private War” puts on screen. This impressive film pulls few punches in unflinchingly detailing from the inside — graphic nightmares included — the complexity of the effects war had on Colvin and the world surrounding her. Though this is his first dramatic feature, Heineman is the key to “A Private War’s” narrative realism. His previous in-harm’s-way films, the exceptional documentaries “City of Ghosts,” about resistance to Islamic State, and “Cartel Land,” concerned with the Mexican drug trade, made this a story he could tell from the inside. An actress who doesn’t always get the credit she should for potent work in unusual and challenging roles (”Gone Girl,” “Hostiles,” “United Kingdom” and “Beirut,” among others), Pike lobbied to play Colvin and has succeeded exceptionally well. It’s not just that Pike changed the timbre of her voice, the way she walks and even her posture to accurately reflect Colvin physically (though she has). It’s that this fierce, livedin performance, complete down to the drawn face and go-for-it personality, is so convincing that people who knew Colvin were shaken at the resemblance. Based on a Vanity Fair profile by Marie Brenner, “A Private War” opens with an aerial shot of Homs, Syria, in 2012, a visual that reveals the catastrophic damage the city suffered at the hands of forces loyal to Bashar Assad. Homs proved to be Colvin’s Waterloo, and the film never lets us forget that as it flashes back, identifying each sequence by telling us how many years before Homs it took place. “Private War” starts in London in 2001 with one of Colvin’s stabs at living an at-home life with an ex-husband with whom she is trying to reconcile. Though born and raised on the North Shore of Long Island, Colvin worked for Britain’s Sunday Times, where her ambitious editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) both wants her to shine and fears for her safety. Against Ryan’s advice, Colvin goes to Sri Lanka to interview a leader of the Tamil Tiger insurgency. On her way out of the combat zone, she is struck by shrapnel and loses the sight in her left eye. Though she initially hates the idea of wearing an eye patch (“the worst idea I ever heard”), Colvin soon embraces it as a personal trademark in London. Colvin’s next major assignment is Iraq in 2003, where she teams up with a freelance photographer, Paul Conroy (excellent work by “Fifty Shades” veteran Jamie Dornan), to check out rumors of mass graves outside Fallujah. This section, which includes a nerve-wracking session at a government checkpoint and the harrow- ing discovery of those graves, is perhaps the film’s most potent and underscores the effectiveness of Heineman’s passion for authenticity. Working with veteran cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Sophie Becher, the director has created a vivid sense of what it feels like being on the ground. Though she well knew the line that foreign correspondents who are both old and bold are nonexistent, Colvin could not resist going to Homs. The notion that anywhere in the world, “people are dying and nobody knows it’s happening” always made her crazy, and “A Private War” is a moving tribute to that magnificent obsession.