Under the Wire

Is it pos­si­ble to look on as the world burns up around you and feel noth­ing? Few could watch with emo­tion­al objec­tiv­i­ty as a woman fails to recog­nise her own grand­son, muti­lat­ed by a bomb blast. The cam­era dis­tin­guish­es itself from what is human, an unthink­ing eye record­ing brute facts. Paul Con­roy, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er part­ner of esteemed war jour­nal­ist Marie Colvin, thinks the atroc­i­ties he has seen have habit­u­at­ed him to such dev­as­tat­ing scenes. As this strik­ing doc­u­men­tary on his time
in Syr­ia pro­gress­es, the tears in his eyes betray his true feelings.

Under the Wire is, in con­cept, a doc­u­men­tary about Colvin in the weeks before she was killed by an explo­sion in Feb­ru­ary 2012. Her sto­ry comes to rest on Conroy’s charis­mat­ic nar­ra­tion to his seem­ing­ly end­less footage, recall­ing nau­se­at­ing crawls through cramped tun­nels and the hor­rors of a Syr­i­an hos­pi­tal. Con­stant­ly focus­ing on the wider onslaught, the loss of Colvin is some­what blurred into the background.

Her relent­less devo­tion to ​“tell the world” what was hap­pen­ing in the Baba Amr dis­trict sus­tains Conroy’s abil­i­ty to return to his trau­mat­ic past. Direc­tor Christo­pher Mar­tin clos­es in on his bat­tle-scarred expres­sion, mak­ing for a more evoca­tive study than his 2013 mem­oir. Regret­tably, the poignan­cy of his mes­sage is under­mined by styl­is­tic ama­teurism, inter­cut­ting footage of torch­light with staged shots of over­flow­ing ash­trays and flash­ing sirens.

Accom­pa­nied by the plods and thumps of Glenn Gre­go­ry and Berenice Scott’s score, the arti­fi­cial ten­sion dis­tracts from the ter­ri­fy­ing con­se­quences at stake. When tack­ling this fear, the film strikes the chord it aims for. Moments of real des­per­a­tion in human faces reveal why jour­nal­ists risk death to report in Syr­ia and beyond, pro­vid­ing a time­ly reflec­tion on the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary footage. A pity, then, that Mar­tin does not leave their sto­ry to stand for itself.