Portrait of a brilliant woman at war with herself
A Private War (15)
Verdict: Fascinating but flawed
THE redoubtable war correspondent Marie Colvin died in 2012 when a rocket hit a media centre in the rebel- held Syrian city of Homs.
This earnest film — with Rosamund Pike as the U.S.-born, UK-based Colvin — tells her story in the years leading up to her death, which was recently found to be a deliberate act of assassination on the part of the assad regime.
Pike is truly brilliant in the part, but then rather like Gary Oldman and his depiction of another former war correspondent, Winston Churchill, in 2017’s darkest Hour, she has masses of character to depict.
The yale- educated Colvin wore a piratical eye-patch, after losing an eye while covering the Sri Lankan civil war. She smoked constantly, was insanely promiscuous, drank and swore like a stevedore and was utterly
fearless in the heat of battle. But she was also assailed by demons in the form of severe posttraumatic stress disorder — hence the film’s title.
Director Matthew Heineman does not spare us any of these details, and makes the most of his background as a documentary-maker to convey the ghastliness of war zones.
The problem with this film is the script, by Arash Amel, who did not exactly cover himself with glory with his 2015 clunker Grace Of Monaco. He throws a rookie female reporter into the fray, who feeds Colvin unlikely lines like ‘journalism is the first rough draft of history’.
It’s a shame, when much of the action seems so real, that much of the dialogue does not.
The wide- eyed reporter serves a similar purpose to Daisy, the simple kitchen maid in Downton Abbey, whose role was to ask other characters what they were doing, so they in turn could spell it out to the audience.
‘ Why are you ironing the newspaper, Mr Carson?’ ‘Well, Daisy . . .’
Nonetheless, A Private War, while not an easy watch, is worth seeing, mainly for Pike’s swaggering performance, though Jamie Dornan ( as her photographer colleague), Tom Hollander (as her editor), Greg Wise (her ex-husband) and Stanley Tucci (a lover) provide top-notch support.