“Love + War” is a sexier title, but the latest from E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin could’ve also accurately been described as life and work when it considers the balance that war photographer Lynsey Addario has had to strike in keeping an vital career going while staying grounded with a family back home. Vasarhelyi and Chin’s films together have always led with the extraordinary, but it’s been understanding the mundane that allows a greater appreciation when somehow the stars of “Free Solo” and “Nyad” have navigated the issues in their personal life and have found a support system that allows them to quite literally reach heights no one else has.
That’s why one of the most tense scenes in “Love + War” isn’t on the ground in Ukraine where the film opens as Addario thinks nothing of wandering around the streets to capture the ravages of the Russian invasion, but in her office at home writing up captions for what she has shot and organizing them, knowing that the time-consuming and frankly dull part of the job is taking away from being with her family as much as the parts she actually enjoys about the work. The photographer is considered fearless by everyone in her life, but when she’s asked to read a bedtime story after working out a schedule that allows her to be back in time for her 10-year-old’s concert in England by way of Poland from Ukraine all in one day, you can see the dread cross her face.
Vasarhelyi and Chin recently executive produced a series called “Photographer,” which it wouldn’t surprise if Addario was planned to be a part of though she’s long been worthy of the feature treatment after stints covering nearly every significant war zone of the 21st century, touching down in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 and Sierra Leone in 2010. Her memoir “It’s What I Do” was optioned long ago with for a dramatic film with Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Lawrence attached, but even they would be hard-pressed to capture the run-and-gun nature of her life as the filmmakers are able to here, having plenty of footage from the battlegrounds she’s been on in the heat of combat, but depicting a kind of cold war developing at home with her husband Paul, who she clearly loves as he does her, but after giving up his work at Reuters for a consultancy that allows him to look after their two kids, the demanding nature of her work is starting to wear on them both, not only the danger she puts herself in, but the less obvious peril of a full-time schedule where if she isn’t taking pictures, she’s doing publicity or administrative work to keep her career on track, one that is designed to bring attention constantly to overlooked humanitarian crises.
It is telling that Addario asked her father, who handed her three older sisters $10,000 for wedding gifts, to be paid upfront to use for camera equipment when she never planned to get married in the first place and only consented to having kids after reorganizing her life’s priorities upon a near-death experience in Fallujah, and everyone’s accepting of the fact that her work comes first, but still that agreement doesn’t make it any easier for all involved as life rolls on. The filmmakers’ sensitivity to both what the other people in Addario’s life need from her and the fact she’s one of the few on earth with the skill and temperament to do what she does for a greater good allows a complex calculus appear to be handled effortlessly. The briskly paced portrait reflects a life that never lets up, though then again neither does Addario, whose tenacity is endearing and though her mother mentions her being raised in a family of hairdressers as part of her humble origins, it clearly made her a gregarious storyteller as well. For all that Addario has survived and been able to convey to the world at large in “Love + War,” Vasarhelyi and Chin show that just getting through the day as a working parent and partner is equally admirable.
“Love + War” will screen again at the Toronto Film Festival on September 13th at 12:20 pm at the Scotiabank.