‘Words of War’ commemorates the courage of a Russian journalist

“Words of War” — 3 stars

The fact that an infinitesimal fraction of people who line up for the latest Marvel superhero movie will bother to see a drama about an ACTUAL hero is frustrating, but I guess it’s understandable. There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

That’s a warning and, in the movie’s moral long view, a dare. Would you do what she did? Would you wait until there was no other choice? Would that be too late?

The film’s a British production directed by a veteran of British TV, James Strong, and it’s meat-and-potatoes stuff as moviemaking goes, doughty and dutiful in following the career of Politkovskaya from the onset of her reporting on the Second Chechen War to her assassination on Oct. 7, 2006 — Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday. British stage and TV actress Maxine Peake plays Politkovskaya with an intense focus that earns the trust of Chechen fighters and their families while alienating her own husband (Jason Isaacs) and grown children (Harry Lawtey and Naomi Battrick).

A movie about a crusading journalist needs a larger-than-life editor to support her, to shield her from the higher-ups and to deliver a big, shouty monologue about the pressures he faces, and that’s Ciarán Hinds as Dmitry Muratov, head of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. When “Words of War” opens in 1999 — after a teaser flash-forward to the 2004 poisoning that nearly killed Politkovskaya — the paper’s early 1990s founding with financial help from Mikhail Gorbachev is receding into the past. Putin, a former KGB boss, has just become prime minister.

As rebels in the Chechen Republic make their second bid for independence and the Russian response grows more punishing, Muratov sends Anna to the capital city of Grozny to write about what she finds, telling her: “We don’t need a war correspondent in Chechnya. We need a people correspondent.” The relationships the reporter subsequently builds with a wary Chechen rebel named Anzor (Fady Elsayed), a young woman named Fatima (Lujza Richter) and others allow her to journey further into the country and document the Russian armed forces’ torture and massacres of Chechen civilians.

“This war is not being fought to rein in a rogue republic,” Politkovskaya reports back to her readers in Russia. “This war is being waged to advance the interest of one person, a president intent on becoming the type of leader Russia thought it had left in the past: a vain, brutal, power-hungry authoritarian.”

This is not the kind of journalism to please a dictator, and the warning signs come quickly enough to label Anna a bear-poker with a death wish. That she becomes a voice to be trusted and listened to not only in Chechnya, but increasingly to the public in Moscow and beyond, only ramps up the threat she represents.

“Words of War” — terrible title, that, and an earlier one, “Anna,” isn’t much better — doesn’t cut corners to comfort an audience. Eric Poppen’s screenplay is frank about the costs that come with being a reporter’s source and frank, too, about the ways in which Politkovskaya’s status as “the one Russian the entire Chechen population trusts” allowed her to be used as a pawn for the government’s own ends. The hostage dramas at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002 and the Beslan school in 2004 testify to the rebels’ desperation, Putin’s disregard for human life, and Anna’s growing distress, fury and stubbornness.

Peake is perhaps best known to U.S. audiences for being chased by robot dogs in a 2017 “Black Mirror” episode, and “Words of War” is only slightly less dystopian in its portrait of a society increasingly gripped by a macho paranoia that can find one determined woman journalist anathema to its very being. The film’s a necessary downer that nonetheless inspires in a viewer an echo of its heroine’s compassion and resolve — qualities to carry forward as the evil that Politkovskaya documented continues to spill past the borders of her country.

“Your children will not judge you on whether you made the world a better place,” Anna responds to her son’s entirely understandable pleas that she back down from holding the powerful to account. “They will judge you on how hard you tried.”

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In theaters. Rated R for violence and language. 117 minutes.