Love+War is the second film in 2025 by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Their first release, Lost in the Jungle, follows the survival of four children in the Colombian Amazon after a plane crash in the woods. The new projects from the Academy Award-winning recipients had premieres at two crucial North American film festivals: Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a productive return to documentary filmmaking for the couple after their narrative debut with Nyad, which earned two acting nominations at the 2024 Academy Awards. Despite the usual pattern of their filmography, Love+War is not a portrait of someone’s superhuman achievement. Actually, it is only the second time in their careers that the duo has made a documentary on someone’s life, a biographical one.
It follows the life and career of Lynsey Addario, a war photojournalist, who freelances primarily for the New York Times. In a media res structure, the film begins with the photographer in Ukraine, right in the midst of the first attacks by Russia. She manages to document a war crime; a Russian missile hits a civilian in a street. Suddenly, she decides to leave Ukraine through Warsaw and return to her life in London, where she lives with her husband, Paul, and two children: Alfred and Lukas. In this moment, the directors throw back to the typical retrospective of the subject’s life: their background, education, and predestination to the career. Yet, this film provides the timeline of her meeting and falling in love with her husband, a wealthy man who used to be an editor for Reuters. At that expository moment, Chin & Vasarhelyi present the initial half of the film’s title, the love. There is a deepening regarding the war, which pinpoints a few of the most impressive conflicts the journalist covered.
Structurally, the new film by the household documentary duo is as conventional as a National Geographic film. It features the rising, the most impressive achievements and work, the call to give up, and the turnaround. This has all of the elements that a streaming documentary requires. Love+War attempts to create an emotional experience through the scarcity of Addario’s life story in her workplace. As interviews affirm, it is no new fact that women have been photographing battlefields, with Lee Miller among the most influential photographers. Yet, very few of them are mothers, and even fewer continue their careers after motherhood. However, despite the advice of colleagues and family, Addario kept on. There is a sentiment of utter necessity of documenting places and events that the rest of the world is not looking at, precisely. And the subject demonstrates that particular emotion, even though it requires physical and mental strength from her part, particularly due to the violence and tension, she cannot abandon it.
Nonetheless, the film offers a conventional, limited look at the photographer’s life and career, despite the immensity of her work. She tells about the experiences of watching the Taliban fall, the rising in Libya, and the subsequent kidnapping of herself and three other NYT journalists, and the urge to cover Ukraine. Each sequence emphasizes her deep longing for action, the agony of missing out, and the community left uncovered by mainstream media. Still, it feels like her need to fulfill the desire to cover and provide an adrenaline rush to her system. It is evident when she watches a CNN program about the genocide in Gaza and laments the impossibility of being there, not the violent act per se. Hence, the fascinating subtext of Love+War relies on the process of banalizing death for an individual who repeatedly faces it, even if the directing duo chooses not to focus enough on the war. The same applies to the gender aspect of Addario and Paul’s relationship. There is a fascinating dynamic in how they organize the chores and how they changed their lives to allow her to continue photographing war. However, it lacks a better approach to these topics, which is not possible given the director’s decision to remain on the surface rather than develop their thematic axis.
Finally, Love+War is another addition to the frustrating streak Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have been on since The Rescue. Lately, their documentaries often feature engaging elements, but they are too conventional and meant for the streaming consumerism that they lack any flavor or attractiveness as an effective documentary feature. Somehow, it feels that the directors of Free Solo need a rescue to return to their golden days.
Love+War is streaming on Hulu.
Learn more about the documentary on Hulu.
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