'A Private War': Film Review | TIFF 2018

[Nergal]

 

Rosamund Pike plays war correspondent Marie Colvin in Matthew Heineman's biopic.


Having directed very well received docs about some of the world's most dangerous places, Matthew Heineman makes his feature debut with the true story of a woman who lived in them — celebrated war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria while exposing the horrors of that country's civil war. Honoring the journalist's sense of mission but never shying away from the hard living and psychological damage that went with it, A Private War relies on the believability of star Rosamund Pike, who commits to this take on the character even when Heineman risks pushing off-the-battlefield drama too far. Thematically similar (though hardly identical) to Erik Poppe's 1,000 Times Good Night, which cast Juliette Binoche as a troubled war photographer and which went practically unseen by Americans, the film has limited commercial prospects despite its virtues, and may find some observers hoping the director will stick with non-fiction.


Foreshadowing its end for viewers who don't know, the film begins with overhead shots of an obliterated 2012 Homs, with voiceover of Colvin being interviewed about why she does what she does. We'll learn later that it's the actual Colvin in this recording, and for a stretch at the film's start, it's hard to get over the way Pike has replicated that voice — not just the British actress' grasp of Colvin's Long Island accent but, more importantly, of the brusque cadences of her journo-speak. Take any four words out of context and you'd be able to guess what this character does for a living, and that she's extremely good at it.


Colvin is always getting awards, which makes it easier for her editor at London's Sunday Times, Tom Hollander's Sean Ryan, to tolerate her resistance to being directed. We're barely past the narrative's first glimpse of her in the field — reporting on Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers in 2001, she gets caught in a firefight and loses an eye (she'll wear an eyepatch from now on) — when Ryan suggests that perhaps she shouldn't go back out there. But a desk reporting job is not her speed, and she's just hitting another rough patch with the man she married and divorced twice.


No sooner has she slammed the door on that cad than we find her in Iraq, predictably chafing at the U.S. coalition's plan to "embed" journalists. Grabbing a freelance photographer she just met, Jamie Dornan's Paul Conroy, she finds a translator and sneaks away to Fallujah. This episode, which establishes her bond with the photographer who'd witness her death nine years later, also demonstrates Colvin's resourcefulness. We watch her use a gym card to bluff her way past a military checkpoint, then see how she verifies stories she's hearing about mass graves: She hires locals with heavy machinery and starts digging, finding corpses and allowing locals to mourn their dead.