Butler's Cinema Scene

Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin

“A PRIVATE WAR” My rating: B+ 

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

There have been enough movies about war correspondents to make up a cinematic subgenre, yet I can recall none with the pure emotional power of “A Private War.”

No doubt much of that has to do with the fact that it’s a true story.  Marie Colvin was a native of Long Island who got into the journalism game and by middle age was one of the most renowned war correspondents on the planet. By the time she died in 2012 covering the civil war in Syria for Britain’s The Sunday Times, she had seen more war than most career soldiers.

No amount of hyperbole can quite express how good Brit actress Rosamund Pike is in the leading role. Her nuanced performance paints an indelible portrait of a woman who was simultaneously heroic and horrified, driven into the arms of danger by a fatal idealism most of us can understand but few of us could emulate.

Kudos to screenwriter Arash Amel, who in adapting Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair profile has found just the right balance of the intensely personal and sweepingly epic; and especially to first-time feature director Matthew Heinemann, whose background in documentaries (his “City of Ghosts,” about volunteer Syrian rescue crews who risk death by pulling  victims from the rubble of bombed-out cities) provided the perfect on-the-job training for this scarily realistic hand-held depiction of modern warfare.

Early in the film Colvin loses an eye covering a revolution in Sri Lanka.  For most of us that would be it…time for a nice cushy desk job.

Not this woman.  (“I’m not hanging up my flak jacket.”)

Driven by a near-pathological need to experience and report the hardships of citizens in war zones, she returns again and again to dangerous environs, focusing not on soldiers but on the suffering of the common man. Even while the bullets were still flying in the U.S. occupation of Iran, Colvin hired heavy equipment to unearth a mass grave where Saddam’s minions had secretly murdered and buried hundreds of villagers who had defied his reign.

Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan

She was in Libya during the 2011 revolution and landed a personal interview with the doomed dictator Muammar Gaddafi (Raad Rawi), who tolerated her pointed and even insulting questions because he admired a woman with balls.

Her dogged pursuit of a story in the face of personal danger left her Times editor (Tom Hollander) ping-ponging between terror and admiration. Along the way Colvin partnered up with Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan), a combat photographer who often against his better instincts followed her into hair-raising situations.

Colvin’s adventures are contrasted with her life back in Britain, where her dedication to the job estranges her from one lover (Greg Wise) and nudges her into the arms of another (Stanley Tucci). More problematical is her alcohol self-medication; the chain-smoking Colvin suffered PTSD (though she denied it, claiming only soldiers got it) and did a stint in a mental hospital.

But no matter the emotional wreckage left behind, she felt compelled to return to the fray to “find the truth” of each gut-wrenching situation. Her writing (we hear some of it read by Pike) was both brutal and poetic; as her editor notes, she had a “God-given talent to make people stop and care.”

I figured we’d seen Pike’s career-best in her perf as “Gone Girl’s” delicious psycho-villainness. Wrong. In “A Private War” she pulls out all the stops without ever going too far. Her Marie Colvin is driven and crazy and sexy and awe-inspiring. Once seen, she’s impossible to forget.

| Robert W. Butler