A Private War

A Private War is the story Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike), the long time Sunday Times war correspondent of whom I was an occasional avid reader (now there's a contradiction).

Colvin, as with most war correspondents, risked her life to report from the front line but she often went where others feared to tread. Over the years she became a legendary figure who lost an eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001 but, once she’d recovered, went back to reporting wearing an eyepatch like a badge of honour.

The film covers Colvin’s career up to her death in Homs in 2012 where she was in a building that the Syrian government shelled. At the time she was in Syria to prove that, despite what Assad had said, the government were targeting civilians. She proved it conclusively with her death and still got a live report in to CNN.

The film goes back a decade or more before Homs and keeps us informed of where we are with rather unnecessary nagging on-screen countdowns e.g. London, England, 10 years before Homs.

Having teamed up with photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) she travels to Fallujah where they uncover mass graves containing victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Then as Colvin continues to be drawn to danger zones, we see her in Afghanistan and then interviewing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

Her editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) constantly fears for her safety and sanity but ultimately he needs her to sell newspapers and, luckily for him, her DNA constantly drove her back to the front line.

Although we do see Colvin in civilian life it is fleeting. She struggles in her relationships (Greg Wise/Stanley Tucci), suffers nightmares, drinks a lot of alcohol, is rarely without a cigarette but she does occasionally pop home to pick up an award. The implication being that her job took a great toll on her but it's not clear if this was the extent of her personal life and it would have been nice to have known more.

Rosamund Pike throws herself into the role and does a good job. The film may be more action movie than I would have liked but I still liked the film a lot. It is pro-journalist at a time when many journalists are rightly being criticised and news itself is under suspicion. Marie Colvin was one who believed in actual facts and real news.

All Is True

In 1613, a mishap with a cannon during a performance of ‘Henry VIII’ or ‘All Is True’ to give it its lesser known alternative title, burns down the Globe Theatre, and William Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) is devastated.

Seemingly with nothing much else to do he heads home to Stratford, to his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), his daughters and into retirement. 

This, however, is no peaceful retreat for our Will as his family aren’t that pleased to see the return of their absentee husband\father and want him to explain what he’s been doing for the last 20 years, and with whom. Well, apart from running than theatre thing, when he should have been spending time with them.

He simply shrugs and busies himself with moaning about his pension, updating his will to among other things leave his ‘second best bed’ to his wife but mainly he immerses himself in very belated grief for his son Hamnet (Sam Ellis) who died 17 years ago at the age of 11 while Will was off making a name for himself in the big city. He starts planning a memorial garden for him.

As if out of spite both daughters create scandals for him. The married one, Susanna (Lydia Wilson), is accused of adultery with the local haberdasher and of catching a venereal disease from him while the unmarried one, Judith (Kathryn Wilder), finally gets married to a man who has just impregnated another woman.

Then to kick a man when’s he’s down, his friend and (whisper it) perhaps once his lover, the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) shows up to tell him how dull he is and urges him to get back to writing but he doesn’t take his advice.

His dullness is perhaps the key point here but was it really necessary to make a film to drive home the point that what came from Shakespeare's pen was much more interesting than his own life. Branagh does manage to play the Bard as the dullest of the dull. It’s an odd casting which is obviously the director’s choice (he’s the director) as a reward for this previous Shakespearean efforts but even odder is Judi Dench as his wife, 20+ years older than him. Yes Anne Hathaway was older than Shakespeare but not that much older.

Written by Ben Elton, the whole film seems a bit of an unnecessary indulgence that mixes accepted fact with lots of ‘what-ifs’ and some stuff that seems completely made up. The film seems to hint that Hamnet was a budding writer, that may have influenced the Bard’s work but then reveals that is was Judith doing the writing all along...

I won’t be recommending it.

Green Book

Green Book is based on the real life friendship between a nightclub bouncer from New York, Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), and an African-American pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali).

Vallelonga also know as Tony Lip, for his bullshitting expertise, is hired as Shirley’s driver and minder as he goes on tour through the still segregated deep south of America in the early 1960s.

They are armed with the Green Book, a guide to hotels and restaurants hospitable to black people, which means that the employee often gets better accommodation than his boss. The further south they go, the more prejudice they encounter and the more Shirley is viewed as a novelty act rather than the world class musician that he is. Shirley knows all this but he is doing this the tour out of defiance because he wants to confront the racism head on even if he isn’t allowed to use their bathroom.

Vallelonga not only has to drive Shirley, ensure that he always gets to play on his cherished Steinway piano, but he also has to protect him from himself. He is prone to act in a very erratic fashion from time to time. Vallelonga has to deal with some thugs in a bar for him and when his sexual escapades with another man land him in jail, he is the one who manages to free him.

 

As the two start to bond, you just know that the pair’s better qualities will rub off on each other and that is how it pans out. The more articulate Shirley even dictates letters for Vallelonga to send back to his wife (Linda Cardellini).

Sadly a lot of the film doesn’t ring true. At the start we see Vallelonga put two glasses in the bin because his wife has let two black workmen drink from them but this level of fanatical racism seems to immediately disappears the moment he meets Shirley. He also appears to be an expert in black culture who introduces his employer to the joys of Aretha Franklin and James Brown. Amazingly Shirley is unaware of them. Oh, and of fried chicken.

It's amiable but lightweight entertainment despite it's heavyweight subject. Generally it is a film more focussed on friendship than civil rights but for saying that we weren't sure if we wanted to see this or not it was a very pleasant surprise. Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are both excellent and make a very engaging odd couple.