MILITARY WIVES

I've been taking advantage of certain studios making current releases available to stream at home.  The choice is limited, and MILITARY WIVES is perhaps not the movie I would have plumped for on a Saturday night had the full choice of London's cineplexes been made available to me.  Nonetheless, it did want I predicted and wanted - it was lightly funny, rather moving and allowed for some catharsis in these strange times.

Based on a true story, the film is about how women cope when their service-people go off to war.  There are lots of small but moving moments - of a woman packing away her husband's things as she becomes effectively a single mother for six months - or another woman telling a protestor she doesn't have the luxury of being against the war, she has to live with it.  You have to admire the grit and no-nonsense courage of these women who keep home life going, knowing their loved ones may not come back.   What I really like about the film is that it shows you a slice of life - with its own codes and expectations - that I hadn't known existed.  Because the wives are in some ways as regimented as their spouses - and when the fighters go to war, the highest ranking wives have to come up with "clubs" that keep the wives' morale boosted.

And so we have the Military Wives Choir - led by  the no-nonsense Sharon Horgan (CATASTROPHE) and the uptight closed off Kristin Scott Thomas (FOUR WEDDINGS etc).  Both actors are playing to type and the personality clash is both inevitable and inevitably resolved. Naturally, Sharon Horgan's character wants the women to sing pop songs and to be inclusive. Naturally, Scott Thomas' character wants the women to be dignified and to actually practice scales and keep time.  Quelle surprise - it takes both skillsets to create a choir that is genuinely good enough to sing at the Royal Albert Hall's memorial concert. Naturally there has to be a third act falling out and making up, just in time for the big concert.  Naturally, one of the wives turns out to have an amazing voice.

So none of this film is surprising in its broad strokes, and it's only intermittently funny in its scenes.  One wishes Sharon Horgan might have been allowed a pass at the script.  But what the film does do is show something of the real ordeal that these spouses endure, and some of the tougher details of military life.  I can't deny that it got a little dusty in the room on a couple of occasions, and genuinely put a smile on my face by the end.  The film appeals - after all - to that same spirit that has all clapping for carers. In adversity, we seek shared uplifting experiences. Which makes this film rather fitting for this moment. 

MILITARY WIVES is rated PG and has a running time of 113 minutes. It is available to stream on Sky, Amazon, Apple etc.

A PRIVATE WAR

Documentary Matthew Heineman (CARTEL LAND) returns to our screens with a fictionalised account of the final years of war journalist Marie Colvin - a story told recently in the superb doc UNDER THE WIRE [link]. His film opens with Marie in Sri Lanka, covering the civil war, being shot in the eye and acquiring her trademark eye-patch. The movie ends 11 years later, inevitably, with Colvin's death, the victim of a targeted bombing in Homs. In between these two events, we see Marie move between war zones and metropolitan dinner parties, carrying with her her trauma, drinking heavily to forget, blaming her editors for sending her out, daring her colleagues to face their face, or overlook it, to return to the war zone, unable to allow herself to quit. She was truly a superb woman, committed to exposing the impact of war on ordinary people, and her cussedness and intelligence one her the access to figures such as Gaddafi, and the respect of her peers and readers. But questions must be asked about the risks she took, whether it was worth it, and the men she led in her wake, not least her photographer Paul Conroy. There's also some tough questions to be asked about why Marie, of all the dead war reporters, gets docs and films.  Because she was so good? Yes, maybe. But maybe also because she was the iconic woman with the eyepatch?

This fictionalised account is well-enough made, with Rosamund Pike doing a superb impression of Colvin. A gritty script doesn't shy aware from her private fears and trauma, the contradictions in her predicament, and the grim reality of being a war reporter.  There's a superb set piece argument with her editor, played by Tom Hollander, that captures the questions at the heart of her story.  But I couldn't help but feeling that this version of events didn't add anything to the experience of watching UNDER THE WIRE, and that rather than being mediated by a fictionalised retelling, I'd rather just here this story from Paul, and from old footage of Marie, and from her friends, editors, colleagues.  This didn't seem to add any greater insight, and because the direction here is workmanlike, it just didn't seem to add anything. 

A PRIVATE WAR is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes.  The film played Toronto and London 2018 and was released last year in the USA. It will be released in the UK on February 15th 2019.