A Private War is a biopic of the celebrated Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin who was, judging from this, brave, humane and utterly fearless as well as a drunk, lonely, traumatised and annoying. A complicated human being, in other words. And why did she do it? Why did she risk her life to get the truth out there? No easy answers are offered, thankfully. It may just be that she had to face death to feel properly alive. I can only say, with confidence, that the film features a magnificently fierce, alert and impassioned performance from Rosamund Pike, whose usual English rose delicacy is nowhere to be seen. It is top work, properly.
Directed by Matthew Heineman, who is otherwise a documentary maker (Cartel Land, City of Ghosts), the film opens with an aerial view of a devastated Homs (Syria), the place that would prove to be her Waterloo. (Colvin was killed there in 2012, having been directly targeted by the Assad regime.) It then flashes back, episodically, showing her in the field and witnessing terrible atrocities in Timor, Iraq and Sri Lanka where she was blinded in one eye by shrapnel, hence the eye patch. These scenes show rubble and mines and shelling and mass graves and dead children and also the particular young girl bleeding to death that would come to haunt her dreams. These images all jumble together, harrowingly, just as, I think we are meant to understand, they did in her mind.
Her work life is alternated with her home life. She was American — Pike speaks in a gruff drawl — but lived in London and this life was a battle front too. She suffered panic attacks. Her dreams made her scream in the night.
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