A woman at war
Pike shines as heroic front-line reporter suffering from post-traumatic stress
There’s a line late in A Private War, the biopic of American war correspondent Marie Colvin, that sums up in eight words why journalists feel compelled to risk their lives to report on conflicts: “I see it so you don’t have to.”
Colvin, expertly captured by Rosamund Pike, is talking to the London-based Sunday Times foreign editor (Tom Hollander, all bluff and bluster). And while her rejoinder scores points for brevity, it’s hardly her last word on the subject. Elsewhere she remarks: “You have to find the truth of it. If you lose that, you’re not helping anybody. You’re just making yourself feel better.”
There’s a strange mix of ego and selflessness at work in a front-line writer like Colvin, the subject of a 2012 article in Vanity Fair that forms the spine of director Matthew Heineman’s debut feature. (He’s previously made documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated Cartel Land from 2015.) But that’s hardly the only internal struggle, as the film’s title intimates.
“I fear growing old, but then I also fear dying young,” she says to a colleague, a line that would be trite if the movie hadn’t already drawn us so thoroughly into its subject’s bleak orbit.
Its excellent screenplay by Arash Amel, also includes a cogent description of posttraumatic stress disorder, from which Colvin clearly suffered and tried to treat with alcohol. (One scene finds her at a party hosted by a character played by Stanley Tucci; he’s celebrating the end of “dry January,” but it’s evident she hasn’t been dry in years.) Basically,
she’s told that the trauma she has witnessed is residing in the part of her brain that processes emotions, which is not where memories are supposed to live. We also get a frightening depiction of the confusion of PTSD made real for the screen.
The film is bookended by scenes in 2012, in the Syrian city of Homs, which was then under heavy shelling from government forces. Chapter headings in between follow the style of “London, 2001 — 11 years before Homs” or “Iraqi border, 2003 — 9 years before Homs,” with the result that, even if you don’t know the particulars of Colvin’s life, you’re primed for something pretty dreadful to happen when we get back there.
Pike proves to be a great casting choice; Colvin was tall, blond and striking even after she lost her left eye in Sri Lanka in 2001 and had to wear a piratical, almost comical eye patch. In another detail lifted from real life, she defiantly wears a La Perla bra under her combat-zone fatigues.
And if you read the Vanity Fair piece by Marie Brenner on which the movie is based, you’ll learn that in 2003 she accidentally left her sat-phone on in Iraq, resulting in a truly off-the-hook bill of $37,000 for the Times.
The film follows Colvin from one conflict to another — this century has never been short on warzones — as we watch her judgment about keeping herself safe grow cloudy. Although if you ditch your U.S. army escort in Iraq to go looking for mass graves, your notions of personal safety are already pretty slippery.
In a rare moment of humour, Colvin flashes a gym membership card at an armed checkpoint guard, claiming to be a nurse. “See? It says health!”
A Private War also captures the camaraderie of the press corps, with Corey Johnson as a fellow correspondent, and Jamie Dornan as Paul Conroy, a Liverpool photographer who never left Colvin’s side. It thus presents yet another reason for doing the job: loyalty.