Marie Colvin was a highly decorated war correspondent for The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, for more than 25 years, scoring interviews with major anti-American figures like Muammar Gaddhafi and Yasir Arafat while reporting from war zones in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Sri Lanka, where she lost sight in her left eye during a grenade attack. She’s been credited with saving the lives of over 1500 women and children in what is now Timor-Leste from an attack by Indonesian-backed forces, and later revealed the existence of a mass grave in Iraq that had the remains of 600 Kuwaiti prisoners. She continued to dive into dangerous situations to report from Libya and then Syria, where she was eventually killed by Syrian artillery fire during the siege on Homs in 2012.
A Private War attempts to tell the story of this fascinating, complicated woman in under two hours, a near-impossible task, but one that this film comes close to approaching by limiting the scope of its chronology to the last thirteen years of her life. This narrow focus gives the film more time to spend with Colvin, played here superbly by Rosamund Pike, in those conflict zones, giving us gripping sequences to highlight her bravery while also showing the violence to which she was regularly exposed. That last point is crucial to the film’s primary theme – that Colvin herself battled post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her dedication to reporting from conflicts, and engaged in some self-destructive behavior as a result. That “private war” of the film’s title is not sufficiently resolved in this film, but Pike does a remarkable job inhabiting this character and all her complexities, enough that we can get a picture of Colvin as a hero who was still very human.
The film thrives on Pike’s performance, which feels note-perfect throughout – she has Colvin’s voice and diction down pat, and shifts comfortably from the confidence, bordering on arrogance, of Colvin at work and in the field to the damaged side of someone suffering from PTSD and, for the first half of the film, refusing to acknowledge it. Colvin sought treatment, depicted in the film, but continued to drink heavily to try to mask it, telling friends she was “in the hole” when the flashbacks and night terrors became so overwhelming she would isolate herself for days. Pike’s Colvin drinks and especially smokes not just to forget but as a reflexive reaction to trauma, both first exposure and its return via flashbacks, yet she’s also compelled to return to the field and even to move further into danger. In the character’s own words, it’s because someone had to tell these civilian war victims’ stories, and if it wasn’t her, no one else would. The film is removed enough from her character to make her motivations ambiguous; her empathy for victims seems real enough, but she appears to be driven by something more, whether it’s adrenaline, ambition, or a need to prove herself.
A Private War plays a little loose with some key points in Colvin’s story, notably that her husband, Juan Carlos Gumucio, killed himself in 2002, within the timeframe of the film – he’s never mentioned at all. The scene outside of Fallujah where Colvin, her longtime photographer Paul Conroy, and a local crew uncovered the mass grave is depicted as the discovery of Iraqi bodies, but the story Colvin wrote on the uncovering identifies them as Kuwaiti prisoners executed and dumped by Saddam Hussein’s forces. Colvin entered Syria for the last time on a motocross bike to get over the border despite a ban on journalists, a scene that isn’t in the film but seems like it would have been tailor-made for Hollywood. The eleven-year-old Palestinian girl whose shooting death the movie version of Colvin describes seeing appears to have been a 22-year-old in real life, which may tie into a regular flashback we see Colvin experiencing throughout the film. And the movie version of Colvin tells a different, over-dramatized story of her childhood and her relationships with her parents, at least compared to the version she gave in real life.
(The film is based on a Vanity Fair article from shortly after Colvin’s death, titled “Marie Colvin’s Private War,” which I’ve used extensively here in this review. One fact in that article that I find fascinating is that she took a class from John Hersey where she read his New Yorker story “Hiroshima,” which still stands today as one of the greatest works of journalism to date. I can’t believe reading that had no effect on her choice of careers.)
If A Private War is flawed, it’s that no film of 110 minutes could give a complete picture of someone like Marie Colvin, who lived a life of enormous achievements, left a tremendous legacy of work and dedication, and was still a three-dimensional human with emotional problems, messy relationships, and demons she acquired through her work. Pike delivers an incredible performance, although it seems like there may be no room at the Oscar inn for her; I’ve only seen two of the five probable nominees for Best Actress but would rank Pike’s performance here over Melissa McCarthy’s in Can You Ever Forgive Me? It’s a more nuanced biopic than most are, and tells a story more people should hear – including me, since I was unfamiliar with her work or legacy before seeing this.
(One warning, however: the film has some harrowing scenes of flashbacks and nightmares to depict Colvin’s PTSD, which seems to me like a probable trigger for audience members with the same disorder, especially if it’s caused by exposure to violence.)