A Pri­vate War

With her icon­ic eye­patch, leg­endary brav­ery and trag­ic death in a Syr­i­an war zone, Amer­i­can war cor­re­spon­dent Marie Colvin sounds like a char­ac­ter from an epic adven­ture movie. In focus­ing on the details of the events and on Colvin’s rea­sons for tak­ing the risks she took, the 2018 doc­u­men­tary Under the Wire showed that there was noth­ing unre­al or fan­tas­ti­cal about Colvin.

The reporter was very much aware of the dan­ger of her pro­fes­sion, but also of its val­ue, which is what car­ried her well beyond where most jour­nal­ists dared to go. Based on a Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle, first-time nar­ra­tive fea­ture direc­tor Matthew Heineman’s A Pri­vate War offers insight into the journalist’s life and pro­fes­sion, retrac­ing the events which pre­sum­ably shaped her character.

The usu­al Hol­ly­wood treat­ment was per­haps to be expect­ed, but the aes­thet­ic feels par­tic­u­lar­ly mis­guid­ed in this case: as we jump back and forth in time between moments of Colvin’s sto­ry, rel­a­tive­ly minor details of her per­son­al life are clum­si­ly jux­ta­posed with the world events and atroc­i­ties she reports on. Colvin’s job was a big part of her life, but the film’s mud­dled attempts to bridge the gap between her pri­vate life and her incred­i­bly self­less work feels rather awkward.

Rosamund Pike’s cen­tral per­for­mance as Colvin gives some sense of the larg­er-than-life qual­i­ty of the jour­nal­ist, but feels over­stat­ed at times, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to Jamie Dornan’s more mut­ed turn as fel­low war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Paul Con­roy. A Pri­vate War is at its best when it focus­es on ten­sion and dan­ger in the field.

Heine­man brings his skills as a doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er (he pre­vi­ous­ly made City of Ghosts and Car­tel Land) to gen­uine­ly ter­ri­fy­ing sequences of com­bat, his dynam­ic cam­era glid­ing through dust and fire. These scenes land us in the moment unlike much of the more con­ven­tion­al human dra­ma Heine­man builds elsewhere.