A Private War

Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) was a fearless British journalist who put her life on the line to chronicle the horrors of war. She often said that war reporting wasn’t about armaments or troops, but rather about innocent civilians whose lives were being destroyed. Colvin grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island. After graduating from Yale, she landed a job with United Press International, eventually rising to Paris bureau chief. In 1986, she became the Middle East correspondent for London’s Sunday Times, landing exclusive interviews with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat. In 1999 in East Timor, Colvin was barricaded with refugees in a U.N. compound, surrounded by the Indonesian army. While other journalists fled, she dispatched reports. Eventually, the government relented and evacuated the refugees, and Colvin was credited with saving some 1,500 lives. Known as a gregarious hard-drinking chain-smoker, Colvin loved wearing expensive La Perla lingerie beneath her combat khakis. After she lost an eye in a grenade blast with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a jaunty black eyepatch became her trademark. Married and divorced three times, Colvin suffered from PTSD and died in 2012 at age 56 in Homs, Syria, while reporting about Bashar al-Assad’s mass bombing of civilians. Pike ably replicates Colvin’s distinctly husky voice, her gestures, urgency, and intensity, and she is well supported by Jamie Dornan and Stanley Tucci. Adapted from Marie Brenner’s 2012 Vanity Fair profile, director Matthew Heineman’s compelling biopic is recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a “Women in the World Summit” Q&A with director Matthew Heineman and the cast (10 min.), and the behind-the-scenes featurettes “Becoming Marie Colvin” (4 min.) and “Requiem for A Private War” (2 min.). Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is a bonus digital copy of the film. Bottom line: a decent extras package for this solid portrait.] (S. Granger)