Real Marie Colvin. (Right) Rosamund Pike playing the late war correspondent
A Private War, the biopic of late Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, remains an ignored masterpiece despite its relevance to inhuman violence against innocent civilians by despots.
Almost at the beginning, Colvin, played by the British actress Rosamand Pike, is seen walking with thrice-injured LTTE war veteran Thamilselvam, portrayed by Sri Lankan-born Antonythasan Jesuthasan of Canne’s Palme d’or-winning Dheepan fame.
Incidentally, Jesuthasan next project will be a movie based on award-winning Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Story of a Brief Marriage, based on a fictional love story during the last few days the Jaffna war.
Thamilselvam asks Colvin to write about Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam struggle for independence from Colombo government but her response annoys the LTTE No.2, who died in an army bomb attack in 2009 during the last days of the 30-year war.
Colvin says she only reports about the suffering masses and points directly to Tigers’ attempts to divert charity food trucks for their own use. Irritated, Thamilselvam who moves around hobbling on a walking stick, draws the curtain of a canvass tent where starving and injured families are seen huddled together.
In the evening Colvin treks through the Vanni jungles surrounded by LTTE fighters. This scene is not obviously shot in Jaffna as the type of palm trees we see in the film do not exist in Jaffna jungles. The group walks into an open land where the army wait in ambush and opens fire.
“Journalist, journalist” Colvin cries loud, raising her hands in the dark but that does not stop the gunfire. Army seemed to have known her exact whereabouts though she sneaks into the Vanni unnoticed.
“Shoot the bloody bitch” cries a soldier in Sinhala. The gunfire fells Colvin, with an eye gushing streams of blood. She loses the sight of her left eye in the Vanni and gets used to wearing an eye patch, becoming a voice for the oppressed masses massacred by their own leaders.
Colvin was targeted wherever she covered wars because the repressive governments feared her courage and heroism to tread deadly battlefields to dig the truth from the rubbles of the war.
Winner of foreign correspondent of the year award offered by the British Press Association in 2011, she reported live on CNN, covered in falling debris of bombed out buildings, huddled together with dying children and women, pleading the world for help.
The biopic is also about her own private war. She was a chain smoker, heavy drinker, also grappling with PTSD and unsuccessful in marriage. Her two miscarriages seems to have developed a particular affinity with starving and dying kids on the battle field and, in fact in 1999 she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children from a compound in East Timor besieged by Indonesian-backed forces.
One mother in Homs Syria was feeding her kid sugar water as she had lost the ability to lactate amid escalating violence. One of her shell-shocked sons had stopped talking after a bomb attack. A Syrian militia leader counts 47 attacks in one minute against unarmed civilians termed as enemy targets by Assad regime.
The film is based on the 2012 article Marie Colvin’s Private War in Vanity Fair. Both Colvin and her photographer Paul Conroy, played by Irish actor Jamie Dornan, were caught in the crossfire. Colvin died in 2012, 11 years after she was injured in the Sri Lankan attack. She perished in Homs while injured Conroy watched helplessly.
In Libya, Colvin interviewed Mummar Ghadaffi (played by Raad Rawi). Keeping cool against all her probing questions about his support to IRA and attempts to thwart Arab Spring by asking his men to rape thousand girls, the former Libyan dictator hits on her saying “Of all the women in the world I like spending time with you most, more than Condy Rice, although she is a very strong woman of African origin”. A few days later she saw Khaddafi’s bullet-riddled body spread on a mattress on a meat locker while newly-formed militia members were taking selfies with the corpse.
The film remains one of the best films about the mindless brutality of armed conflicts and freedom struggles. Despite its relevance to the modern world where many journalists are still being killed, A Private War managed to collect only a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for Pike despite her Oscar-worthy performance. Haunting war anthem Requiem for A Private War by Annie Lennox was nominated for Best Original Song, also by Golden Globes.
Time magazine said in an article that Pike got one of the biggest snubs at 2019 Oscars. The news magazine also added that real-life war correspondent Marie Colvin, ‘may have been hurt by the movie’s relatively low profit’. It earned only $2.4 million at the box office up to last January.
Directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian Matthew Heineman, the film offered the best chance for Pike to be in Oscars ever since she picked up a best actress nomination for Gone Girl.
Critic Jacob Sarkisian who predicted an Oscar for Pike said that she is a British import. Five of the last Oscar ceremonies featured at least one British actress in the Best Category, he said, citing it as a strong plus point for her. Pike too got rave reviews and ‘she is the face of the film and it is an ode to true journalism in a time of scurrilous accusations of fake news, and she is fighting for the wide open fifth Best actress slot’, Sarksian pointed out.
British star Olivia Colman who won the best actress award was a complete surprise while Glenn Close looked like close to topping the category. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars and Colman ended up being the film’s sole winner.
A Private War was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last year and the lackadaisical response to this classic is totally surprising. Perhaps, people who are exposed to out-of-control regional violence 24/7 without any foreseeable solution, look for different types of movie entertainment. Foreign wars are always seen as someone else’s problem – newstrails.com
