A Private War review: Rosamund Pike convinces as Marie Colvin, but this biopic is too narrow in its vision

There’s a fully committed performance from Pike as the war reporter, but no other character gets a look-in

Director: Matthew Heineman. Starring: Rosamund Pike, Tom Hollander, Jamie Dornan, Stanley Tucci, Faye Marsay, Greg Wise. Cert 15, 110 mins

The Marie Colvin portrayed in biopic A Private War is a determinedly contradictory figure. The celebrated foreign correspondent killed in Syria in 2012 lives up to the stereotype of the glamorous, hard-drinking, Martha Gellhorn-like journalist, always ready to put herself in the eye of danger.

She is like a character from a Howard Hawks movie: she smokes as much as Lauren Bacall and she has the drive and self-reliance found in all of Hawks’ best-known heroes and heroines. At the same time, Colvin is depicted here as a tormented figure, restless and unhappy in her private life and increasingly reckless in her career choices.

Rosamund Pike gives a fully committed method-style performance as Colvin. With her frizzy hair, eye patch and drawl, she looks and sounds convincingly like the woman she is playing.

The film, based on a Vanity Fair article about Colvin by Marie Brenner published in 2012, has a morbid structure. It is a countdown to its subject’s death. Arash Amel’s screenplay takes the audience through key episodes in Colvin’s life. Each chapter tells the audience how long it is until the assignment in Homs, Syria, where she will be killed.

Director Matthew Heineman previously made the documentaries Cartel Land, about the narco wars in Mexico, and City of Ghosts, about undercover activists in Isis-controlled Raqqa. Reflecting his experiences on such projects, A Private War is at its most convincing in its depiction of Colvin on the front line. Whether Heineman is showing her in Sri Lanka, where she sustained the injuries that cost her the eye, or on the Iraqi border or in Afghanistan, the war sequences have a frightening immediacy. The reporters will be shown bantering together as an army officer lectures them about the rules governing embedded journalists but then Heineman will show scenes of devastation: mutilated bodies, kids clinging to life as their grief-stricken mothers sit beside them, corpses dotted over the landscapes.

After such carnage, Colvin’s private problems back home in Britain can’t help but seem inconsequential. Although the journalist herself is portrayed in depth, all the other characters in the film are very superficially sketched and Colvin’s private life is skimmed over. For all her toughness when out in the field, she is prey to self-pity. She talks of her yearning to be “a mum like my sister” and laments the two miscarriages she has had. She is terrified of growing old but equally scared of dying young. She is an alcoholic suffering from post-traumatic stress. All this angst, though, is forgotten once she is out in the field.

At times, the storytelling becomes sanctimonious. Colvin will be told that she has a “god-given talent to make people stop and care”. Her editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) bustles around her, like a courtier with his queen. He may get annoyed with how much she smokes and with her extravagant use of the satellite telephone but he treats her with veneration. “If you lose your conviction, what hope is there for the rest of us” is one of the more earnest lines.

In these scenes, Colvin isn’t presented as a news journalist competing against her rivals and looking for scoops but as a martyr-like figure. She bears witness to the horrors of war on behalf of her readers. She sees it so we don’t have to.

There are tensions here which the filmmakers don’t want to address too closely. Ryan’s star reporter has won the paper countless awards which sit on his office mantlepiece. It is never clear whether he admires her for her courage and selflessness or because of the prestige and circulation boost they bring him.

Jamie Dornan is a long way removed from Fifty Shades of Grey as the doggedly loyal photographer, Paul Conroy, who is with her on many of her missions including the final one to Homs. He is a colourful character in his own right but the filmmakers have little interest in him. His main function is as Colvin’s sidekick. The same can be said of the wealthy businessman Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci) with whom she has an affair which looks as if it might blossom forth into a proper relationship. They meet at a party. She spends time in his luxury penthouse beside the Thames but she is too keen to get back in the warzone to tarry.

Nor do we learn much about Rita Williams (Nikki Amuka-Bird), ostensibly Colvin’s best and most loyal friend. Like everybody else in the film, Rita is there as a foil to Colvin, not as a fully fledged character in her own right.

Even Libyan dictator Gaddafi (soon to die like a rat in a sewer) plays second fiddle to her. When she interviews him, she does the talking and he listens as she harangues him. He then tells her how much he admires her.

Pike gives a thoroughly convincing performance as Colvin. A Private War offers a stirring account of the journalist’s life, career, and tragic, untimely death. As drama, though, it is two-dimensional. The filmmakers are so focused on Colvin that they don’t seem to notice anything else