{"id":3697,"date":"2016-05-19T13:50:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T08:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2016-05-19T13:50:32","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T08:20:32","slug":"a-private-war-review-rosamund-pike-marie-colvin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=3697","title":{"rendered":"A Private War Review: A Searing Account of the Human Cost of Conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I<\/span><\/p><\/div>

t\u2019s not often that actresses are enlisted for a role that demands them to erase traces of their arresting physicality, to relegate their beauty to the background. That is a luxury reserved for male actors, whose emotional, physical, vocal, and even existential transformations are consistently valorised \u2013 think Bradley Cooper in <\/span>A Star In Born<\/span><\/i><\/a>. <\/span>\n\nBut in Matthew Heineman\u2019s debut feature <\/span>A Private War<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Rosamund Pike<\/span><\/a> gets that incredible chance; essaying the complex and conflicted legacy of late <\/span>Sunday Times<\/span><\/i> war correspondent, Marie Colvin. And Pike \u2013 \u00a0a severely under-tapped actor \u2013 runs with it, channelling the psyche and physical turmoil of a woman who thrives between bravery and bravado in an electrically charged performance. The actress invokes Colvin with such invigorating honesty that it\u2019s impossible to keep reminding yourself that Pike is an actress playing a character and not the other way around. It\u2019s best evidenced in how eerily the British actress replicates Colvin\u2019s voice and her Long Island accent down pat. <\/span>\n\nAdapted from a posthumus <\/span>Vanity Fair<\/span><\/i> profile of Colvin<\/span><\/a> and helmed by documentary filmmaker, Heineman \u2013 who previously made <\/span>Cartel Land<\/span><\/i> and the excellent <\/span>City of Ghosts<\/span><\/i> \u2013 <\/span>A Private War<\/span><\/i>, covers the last decade of Colvin\u2019s life. It begins in 2001, with her ill-fated trip to cover the Sri Lankan Civil War that ended in Colvin losing her left eye after being fired upon by government forces. And it ends in 2012, when she was assassinated by the Assad government in a <\/span>\u201ctargeted rocket attack\u201d<\/span><\/a> while covering the Syrian Civil War. In between, the film follows Colvin on war assignments in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan \u2013 contrasting and complementing it with her affluent life in London, where she suffered from PTSD and took refuge in alcoholism.<\/span>\n\nA Private War<\/span><\/i> boasts of a similar urgency that marks Heineman\u2019s documentaries, especially last year\u2019s <\/span>City Of Ghosts<\/span><\/i>, that chronicled the atrocities committed by ISIS through the eyes of a Syrian rebel citizen journalist group. Adopting the same unfussy and economical approach, Heineman uses the contradictions of his lead protagonist to reel in the audience to ruminate on the human horrors of war. In a biting monologue from rehab\u00a0\u2013 elevated infinitely by Pike\u00a0\u2013 Colvin admits, \u201cI fear growing old but I also fear dying young\u201d and \u201cI hate being in a war zone but feel compelled to see it for myself.\u201d The powerful sequence tells you as much about the price Colvin pays to bear witness, as much as war itself.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nThroughout the film\u2019s taut 110 minutes, we get enough clues into Colvin\u2019s personality: There\u2019s her trademark eye-patch restlessness and nervous tics, her meticulous note-taking, and her penchant for wearing fancy bras in war zones so that \u201cher corpse is well dressed\u201d. The film touches upon Colvin\u2019s close friendship with photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan perfectly cast against type) who was with her when she died, and a recurring nightmare of the Palestinian woman whose death she witnessed years ago in Beirut that kept haunting her. Heineman even acknowledges the one thing that has baffled almost everyone who knew of Colvin \u2013 her inexplicable obsession with placing herself in the line of danger in conflict zones and testing her psychological endurance.<\/span>\n\n

\u201cWe fail when we don\u2019t know what war really does.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nA Private War <\/span><\/i>then implies that Colvin\u2019s bravery \u2013 when seen in the context of PTSD and the emotional toll her assignments took on her \u2013 might actually be an act of self-destruction and delusion. But the film refuses to doubt her professional judgement or paint her as someone who wasn\u2019t acutely aware and in control of her actions. In fact, it speaks of Heineman\u2019s mastery over his craft that he treats Colvin not merely as a hero who died fighting, but as a victim, whose judgements suffered because she was forced to endure the wrath of war.<\/span>\n\nLike Colvin, who in a scene claims that she cares little about war strategies, but more about human tragedies, <\/span>A Private War <\/span><\/i>doesn\u2019t bother itself with details, instead investing in the civilians bearing the brunt of war. Not only does Heineman <\/span>cast real refugees<\/span><\/a> in the film, he also ensures that every reenacted scenario with Pike and a refugee were improvised and not fictionalised. This is Heineman carrying forward Colvin\u2019s message to \u201cmake people stop and care\u201d by putting the sufferings of millions on record.<\/span>\n\nThere\u2019s a heart-wrenching sequence where a Syrian refugee \u2013 whose nephew was shot at during a rally \u2013 had to react to a dead child in a hospital, as Colvin looks on. And another, where a trapped Syrian woman confides in Pike that she can\u2019t breastfeed her newborn due to the trauma she underwent after seeing her five-year-old daughter die. After witnessing these horrors, it\u2019s no wonder why the film insists on showing how Colvin\u2019s reality and hallucinations frequently coalesce.<\/span>\n\nAt a time when newspaper headlines are dominated by the cold-blood assasination of Jamal Khashoggi, Yemen\u2019s malnourishment crisis, and the continued atrocities in \u00a0Syria, <\/span>A Private War<\/span><\/i> is a piercing plea championing empathy, asking us to not turn a blind eye to the abject suffering of countless faceless civilians. Because like what Colvin \u2013 who turned the world\u2019s attention to multiple wars in life and death \u2013 says in the film, \u201cWe fail when we don\u2019t know what war really does.\u201d <\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Heineman\u2019s A Private War, features an electrically charged Rosamund Pike, who undergoes a physical, emotional, and vocal transformation to play slain war correspondent Marie Colvin. The film doesn\u2019t bother itself with details, instead investing in the civilians bearing the brunt of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":3698,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nA Private War Review: A Searing Account of the Human Cost of Conflict<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Matthew Heineman\u2019s A Private War, features an electrically charged Rosamund Pike, who undergoes a physical, emotional, and vocal transformation to play slain war correspondent Marie Colvin. 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