Review

A Private War

Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) is a troubled war correspondent in the fact-based A Private War, the first feature from documentary director Matthew Heineman.
Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) is a troubled war correspondent in the fact-based A Private War, the first feature from documentary director Matthew Heineman.

In the press notes for his first narrative feature, A Private War, nonfiction filmmaker Matthew Heineman says he didn't want to make this gently fictionalized portrait of war correspondent Marie Colvin into a biopic. And he hasn't: What he has made is a deeply distressing, authentically moving psychological study of unswerving obsession.

Anchored by Rosamund Pike's powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant. Covering 2001 until Colvin's death in Syria in 2012, Arash Amel's occasionally bumpy storytelling (based on a 2012 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner) jumps uneasily from one war zone to another. Facts are fuzzy, the rubble and bodies and wailing women blurring together until you realize that's the point: locations change, but armed conflict is always the same in the innocents it claims and the suffering it causes. To Colvin -- whether half-blinded by shrapnel in Sri Lanka or uncovering a mass grave in Iraq -- that suffering was always the story.

A Private War

87 Cast: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Stanley Tucci, Tom Hollander, Faye Marsay, Greg Wise

Director: Matthew Heineman

Rating: R, for disturbing violent images, language throughout and brief sexuality/nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Brief hiatuses in London, where she worked for The Sunday Times, reveal the detritus of her personal life and the mental and physical toll of her work. Sucking on cigarettes and bedeviled by panic attacks, she's more comfortable sporting blackened fingernails on the battlefield than pearls at her own award ceremony. Yet this is no neutered paragon, but a healthily sexual woman who wears designer bras beneath her androgynous work shirts.

Afraid both of dying young and of growing old, Colvin addictively courts a chaos that cinematographer Robert Richardson renders so vividly he seems keen to give us all a little of her PTSD. The real Colvin would have probably approved.

MovieStyle on 11/16/2018

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