A remarkable life made trite
A Private War 15 cert, 110 min
Dir Matthew Heineman Starring Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Faye Marsay, Greg Wise
On paper, a film about Marie Colvin sounds like gripping viewing, perhaps in part because paper was the medium in which Colvin thrived. The late Sunday Times war correspondent was a celebrity journalist in the very best sense: it was impossible to flick past one of her reports, not least because of that un-flick-past-able byline photograph, with its eye-patch that served as both a stamp of her life-on-the-line authenticity, and subliminal nod towards her buccaneering fearlessness in pursuit of the latest scoop.
Watching Matthew Heineman’s film, though, the woman behind the words is nowhere to be found. Played by Rosamund Pike across the last 11 years of her life, Marie Colvin’s work doesn’t so much resemble the adrenalised cut and thrust of journalism in extremis as the ideological crusade of a martyr-inwaiting. It arrives in cinemas eight years after Colvin’s death under shellfire in Homs – and mere weeks after a US court found this was no accident, but an extrajudicial killing by the Assad regime. But its grindingly earnest tone is that of the hasty posthumous tribute, rather than the more textured, inquiring long view of a worthwhile biopic. By turns finger-wagging and trite, it is a film more comfortable with lionising its subject than analysing her, and it treats any complicating personal factors as nuisances to be swatted.
A moment late in the film, nicely played in isolation, rings the problem in red ink. It is 2011, and Colvin is reporting from Misurata, where a young soldier has just furnished her with a startling scoop: Gaddafi’s loyalist forces were ordered to rape at least 1,000 female civilians who were cornered by fighting in the Libyan city.
With supreme subtlety and control, Pike shows us horror and excitement quietly jostling for facial real estate: Colvin is reconciling herself to the fact that a human rights atrocity can also be a great story. But the film offers no insight into why she is out getting these stories, beyond the blunt fact that, well, she is Marie Colvin, and that is what Marie Colvin did.
A Private War was written by Arash Amel (whose last film but one was the notorious Grace Kelly biopic
Grace of Monaco) and directed by American documentary filmmaker Heineman, who makes his fiction debut here. This proves a deadly combination. Amel’s characters address one another in overwrought eulogy-ese that’s at preposterous odds with Heineman’s naturalistic style. “What do you hear when the music stops?” a concerned friend (Nikki Amuka-bird) sombrely asks Colvin at a house party: this is how movie trailers talk, not adult humans carefully broaching the subject of alcoholism and PTSD with a lifelong confidante.
The supporting players are generally unpersuasive – not least Colvin’s editor (Tom Hollander), a flustered, simpering weed who would be out on his ear on Fleet Street before first edition was put to bed. At one point he is heard to wail in Colvin’s direction, “If you lose your conviction, then what hope do the rest of us have?”, a sentence no British newspaper editor in history has ever said aloud non-sarcastically.
Jamie Dornan has a little more to work with as Colvin’s gruff hunk of a regular photographer, Paul Conroy, whose own book about their time in Homs, Under The Wire, was adapted into a documentary last year. And Stanley Tucci has a soothingly pleasant handful of scenes as a love interest. But the various Arabs and Tamils are the binary opposite of what they were in Colvin’s writing: anonymous background colour.
Despite her editor’s concerns, Colvin naturally does not lose her conviction. But this film has rather too much conviction for its own good.