Bold war correspondent was addicted to danger
Gritty biopic about late Marie Colvin depicts her personal battles
“A Private War” tells the story of war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in 2012, while covering the war in Syria. In addition to her reporting, she was known for wearing an eye patch, having lost her left eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka. By any measure, this was a remarkable person of vast accomplishment, the kind that Hollywood makes movies about. Here’s what’s interesting: from us Colvin’s the usual “A professional Private biopic. War” It shows achievements, is far much on but the it cost concentrates of those just as achievements. And we’re not talking about Ray Charles experiencing melancholy or Johnny Cash feeling sad that his father wished he’d have died and not his brother. We’re talking about a woman who was swallowed up by her job, who became a physical and psychological wreck, who needed to drink a quart of vodka to make the “chattering” in her head go away, and who woke up screaming in the night. Soldiers can go on one tour of duty and come back with posttraumatic stress disorder. Colvin’s entire career was traumatic stress, something anywhere for decades. in horrible the world, If taking there she place was went there. Scene after scene in “A Private War” shows Rosamund Pike, as Colvin, dodging bullets and bombs in places that look like the surface of the moon. The movie shows her functioning with inspired proficiency in every crisis, and then coming home to nightmares and binge drinking. We watch as Colvin’s teeth go bad. At one point she coughs — from smoking constantly — and
a tooth falls out of her mouth. At first, we might wonder about this as a storytelling strategy: Is this a tribute or an expose? But gradually we come to realize that “A Private War” is a far more profound tribute than any sugar-coated hagiography could have been. The movie shows how hard it was, and yet she did it, anyway, over and over, until it killed her.
What kind of person would choose that life? That’s essentially the investigation of Pike’s brilliant performance. Colvin, as presented here, is an adrenaline junkie, to be sure. She is addicted to danger. But the movie persuasively suggests something deeper at work, a humanitarian impulse, a well of bottomless feeling beneath the crusty surface.
The movie doesn’t make a fuss about it, or even hint at it through dialogue, but a sense comes through, nonetheless, that at least some of Colvin’s greatness had to do with her being a woman. We see her gravitating toward stories of displaced women and children, of babies and toddlers killed by bombs and stray bullets; we see her looking at the grieving faces of village women, and hearing stories of rape as a form of terror — and the connections she makes and the empathy she feels are very much a woman’s.
Likewise, when she goes home, her nightmares aren’t about finding herself in danger, but about seeing ghastly crimes committed against others. Over and over, she remembers seeing the lifeless body of a girl laid out on a bed. Sometimes she imagines that girl in her bed.
As we watch, conflicting thoughts cross the mind: No one of such sensitivity should ever do that job. Yet, no one without such sensitivity could and would ever do that job — at least at such a level of excellence. In Iraq, for example, she doesn’t go with the Pentagon’s embed program. She poses as a nurse and hires a car to take her to Fallujah, and she’s almost killed on the way.
Pike triumphs in this emotionally and physically taxing role. Colvin was a mystery: Why did she do the things she did? Where did her courage come from? Pike, though playing a woman on a grand scale, is content to keep something in reserve. There’s no big reveal, no effort to offer explanations, just a commitment to each moment. Pike’s Colvin is brave, but she’s not tough, and, scene by scene, she reveals more and gives more than she probably means to.