A Private War *** (2018, Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Stanley Tucci, Tom Hollander, Greg Wise) – Movie Review

Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary film-maker Matthew Heineman’s first feature film as director, A Private War (2018), is an honourable toast to old-style newspaper journalism, which is fast disappearing along with books, and its backbone, the old-style reporters who were ready do anything to bring or send back their story.

In a surprise piece of casting, Rosamund Pike stars as fearless celebrated American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who reports from the dangerous front line of world conflicts. After she is hit by a grenade in Sri Lanka and loses an eye, she wears an eye patch and continues to enjoy vodka martinis with London’s elite and confronting dictators like Gaddafi.

Colvin sacrifices a loving relationship with Professor David Irens (Greg Wise) but later takes up with American in London Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci). She is not really a relationships kind of woman. She is way too busy with her career. The harrowing sights she has seen turn her into a battle-fatigued, heavy-smoking, alcoholic and deeply troubled individual. She has great courage but she has suffered trauma. She needs to heal.

Her newspaper, The Sunday Times, and its editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander), think the world of her and are remarkably tolerant with her aberrant behaviour. This aspect of the newspaper world does not ring true, indeed the newspaper background and its characters are sketchy and often unconvincing. Sean Ryan is quite a caring character, which is completely unlike any Fleet Street editor ever, though he still prompts Colvin to nip over to danger zones whenever she still feels like it. If she is suicidal, he is a bit homicidal, but in a caring kind of way. Hollander’s quite good at this, by the way.

Rosamund Pike throws herself in to the action and emotion like an actress long starved of any decent work. It is a huge star role, and she is good, very good, though I didn’t really quite buy her act as Marie Colvin.

She teams up with freelance war photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) and, in the film’s long heralded climax, eventually sets out with him on the most dangerous assignment of her life in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. She keeps pushing both of them into more and more danger to get her story and message across, not only to The Sunday Times, but also to the US, via a computer to TV link. Does the woman have a death wish, or what?

The film invites loads more questions than it answers. Why is the American Colvin working in London in the first place? Do we really believe all the ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ stuff and the various other platitudes about journalism that the film expects us to swallow wholesale? How saintly is Mr Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times anyway? Is their reporting real news or just sensationalist human interest excitement stuff from abroad? Does Colvin have some psychological problems that the war zone experience is just adding to? Is she a fear junkie?

Fame is fleeting. Colvin may or may not have been famous a decade or so ago, but who has heard of her now? Did she make a difference? Would today’s Sunday Times employ her?

At any rate, it is certainly an interesting story, if totally depressing on several levels, though this is probably not the best film possible from this material. We need to know much more about the other characters in the story, especially photographer Paul Conroy, a role that gives Jamie Dornan a difficult task. Greg Wise disappears too early, and Faye Marsay and Nikki Amuka-Bird’s roles just seem like wallpaper, and Stanley Tucci looks surprise to be in the movie at all.

As usual, real life stories are hard to adapt to compact, satisfying screen experiences. The and than, and than, and than, thing counts against it, with the annoying titles telling us of the years and events we are in, and how long this is away from Homs, Syria. But without that, we’d be lost. And without characters explaining things to each other that they must already know, we’d be lost.

Given that, the writers Marie Brenner and Arash Amel have done a pretty good job, basing their screenplay on the Vanity Fair article Marie Colvin’s Private War. Heineman has done a pretty good job too, turning in a decent, honest and true movie that is food for thought and appeals to the emotions too. It is a relatively rare film that could profit from an extra 15 or 20 minutes to round out its story. That might be a backhanded compliment, but it is one.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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