WAR OF WORDS
Rosamund Pike is brilliant as a boozy, eye-patched reporter on the front line in this…
‘A slightly confused but still powerful portrait ofone of the bravest journalists of her generation’
A Private War C ert: 15A 1hr 50mins
wards season finally comes to a close next weekend with the Oscars, but it has not been a kind one for Rosamund Pike. It got off to an encouraging start with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress but since then… nothing. No Bafta nod, no Oscar nomination, nothing.
Which is a shame and something of an injustice, as Pike is fabulously good as the ferociously unbiddable war correspondent Marie Colvin in A Private War. It’s a part that almost instinctively you feel Pike wouldn’t be right for – too young, too pretty, too refined – and yet she rises to every one of its many considerable challenges, cleverly avoiding the potential for overplaying at every impressive turn. And what potential there is. Not only did the passionately committed Colvin sport a piratical eyepatch (her left eye was badly damaged by a rocket-propelled grenade in Sri Lanka in 2001), but throughout a career that took her to all the world’s major trouble spots – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, finally and tragically, Syria – she was hot-tempered, alcoholic and suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. Casual sex was another of her chosen anaesthetics.
Given that sort of material, lesser actresses might have gone wildly over the top; Pike, however – even mastering Colvin’s deep, guttural semi-American growl – pitches it just right. Many years from now, when she looks back at her career, this is one of those roles she can be rightly proud of. So why hasn’t the film made a bigger impact with award voters?
One reason might be the simple passing of time. It’s almost exactly seven years since the New York-born but London-based Colvin was killed by a Syrian artillery shell in the besieged enclave of Homs, and memories fade unfairly quickly. That said, it was only last month an American court provided a very timely reminder, ruling that the Syrian government had been responsible for her death and ordering the Assad regime to pay her family $300m in damages. Then there’s the fact that these sorts of films do seem to struggle. Three years ago, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the story of journalist Kim Barker, battled to make a profit let alone win awards, despite starring Tina Fey and Margot Robbie and being played for more laughs than are on offer in A Private War. Any film that gets under way, as the latter does, with the caption ‘2001, London, England, 11 years before Homs’ is clearly not out to amuse. The film is directed by Matthew Heineman, who has a reputation as a documentary maker but has never made a feature film before. He does so with a screenplay inspired by a Vanity Fair article but written by Arash Amel, who wrote the screenplay for the execrable Grace Of Monaco.
On paper, that’s not the most promising sounding combination but, in fairness to both, they do a pretty good job of capturing the complexities of Colvin’s character, telling her story and recreating the tragedy of her death. But they also serve up an awful lot of clichés, spring little in the way of surprises and at key moments get bogged down in a structure that has become too complicated for its own good.
There are moments when warzone footage is battling for screen time with the fog of an alcoholic breakdown in London, interspersed with nightmarish visions that existed only in Colvin’s understandably wounded mind. It’s all just a little bit too much and damaging in the same way as the decision to have Colvin’s own reportage read – portentously and self-importantly – over more warzone footage.
This is that strange thing – a serious film guilty of taking itself too seriously. The main casualty of this is the normally excellent Tom Hollander, who doesn’t do anything technically wrong as Colvin’s long-suffering Londonbased boss but equally doesn’t really convince as any sort of editor I’ve ever known. Newspaper journalism is funnier, crueller and more chaotic than this. Jamie Dornan, by contrast, is more plausible as Colvin’s photographer colleague, Paul Conroy, although whether this is because I don’t know many war photographers or because of his likable low-key performance is hard to say.
What emerges is a slightly confused but still powerful portrait of one of the finest and bravest war reporters of her generation. ‘You have to go to places where you
could be killed or where other people are being killed…’ she says. ‘You are never going to get to where you are going if you acknowledge fear… fear comes later, when it’s all over.’ But it’s also a portrait of a badly damaged woman who had been traumatised by what she’d seen, became addicted to war and who, by the awful end, had lost all sense of self-preservation and was out of control. Colvin was 56 when she was killed; Pike has just turned 40. But she convinces from beginning to end, and A Private War is worth seeing for her and the extraordinary Colvin too, of course.