Critic’s choice: Rosamund Pike nails it as war reporter Marie Colvin
Rosamund Pike is excellent as renowned journalist Marie Colvin in a film that doesn’t quite work, says Paul Whitington
A Private War (15A, 110mins)
Ionce interviewed the legendary war photographer Don McCullin. He and his camera popped up everywhere in the 1960s and 70s — Vietnam, Beirut, Northern Ireland, Palestine — but when I mentioned the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s, the light seemed to go out of his eyes. He was present at Stanleyville to witness the aftermath of massacres, and calmly described to me this tableau of human misery; he particularly remembered corpses bobbing, forever unclaimed, downriver. Then he fell silent.
War correspondents and photographers often end up seeing more combat than most soldiers, and the psychological effects can be devastating. This occupational hazard is central to Matthew Heineman’s film A Private War, which is not so much a biopic of award-winning journalist Marie Colvin as a record of her time on the front line. Born in Queens, based in London, Colvin made her name after becoming The Sunday Times’ Middle East correspondent in 1985: she was the first western journalist to interview Muammar Gaddafi, and got that famous quote about Ronald Reagan being “an Israeli dog”.
In 1995, she discovered her true calling after being moved to the paper’s foreign desk. “War is about what happens to people,” she once said, and after witnessing the horrors of Chechnya and Kosovo, she became committed to the mission of recording the terrible suffering of civilians in conflict. She would do so dutifully, and dynamically, but at a heavy personal cost. When we first meet her in A Private War, Marie (Rosamund Pike) is relaxing at home in London with her boyfriend, and trying to live a normal life. That, however, is one task she has no flair for, and as soon as a conflict kicks off somewhere, she dons the flak jacket and heads for Heathrow. Her courage is extraordinary, and when she’s embedded with Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka, a blast from a rocket grenade destroys her left eye. She returns to London sporting a jaunty eye patch that only adds to her legend, and while some journalists would be put off by such a life-altering attack, Colvin is soon back out in the field.
Her sincerity in wanting to shine a light on pointless human suffering is absolutely genuine, but like a lot of war correspondents, Marie has also become addicted to the adrenalin rush of combat, or rather finds its absence intolerable. Visibly ill-at-ease at awards ceremonies and social functions, she feels more at home in war zones, in the company of battle-hardened journalists and photographers, one of whom is about to become her final partner in crime.
Liverpool photojournalist Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) first teams up with Marie in Iraq, and in 2012 agrees to accompany her on an extremely risky trip to war-torn Syria. Cut off from all foreign observers and besieged by Bashar al-Assad forces, the city of Homs is being bombarded day and night, and Colvin wants to go there to expose Assad’s lie that no civilians are being targeted. That she does, in a series of gripping articles and TV broadcasts, but ignores all calls to leave the city before it’s too late.
Heineman has said that he did not want A Private War to be a biopic, but rather an account of the rising toll of Colvin’s work. That it is, and the film proceeds in a fog of combat, building towards the dusty nightmare of Homs.
That dreadful battle is brilliantly recreated by Heineman and his cinematographer, Robert Richardson, and provides the film’s most boldly cinematic moments. But in terms of Colvin herself, we’re not really given enough to go on as we try to make sense of her life.
This is not the fault of Rosamund Pike, who throws herself fearlessly into Colvin’s larger-than-life persona, smoking and boozing and swearing up a storm as she battles with her perfidious editor (Tom Hollander) and a recurring case of PTSD. But her suffering seems tinny, perhaps because it has no context: we’re given no insight into her early life, or why she might have been so impelled to walk towards the gunfire.
As Paul Conroy, Dornan does his best to suppress the soft twangs of his Belfast accent, and Stanley Tucci (always a welcome sight) seems very amused by nothing in particular when he turns up as an amorous City of London investor type. But this is Pike’s film, and her dedication and grit are to be commended. If only she’d been given a little bit more to work with.
That dreadful battle is brilliantly recreated by Heineman and his cinematographer, and provides the film’s most boldly cinematic moments