Watching A Mighty Heart, Michael Winterbottom's new film chronicling the days between the 2002 abduction of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and his eventual murder, is something like the experience of waiting for terrible news to be delivered to the only people who haven't heard it yet. The viewing audience is, of course, painfully aware of the famous outcome of this story -- the graphic video of Pearl's killing sprouted up on websites and media outlets soon after his death – and its specter hangs over every scene. Regardless of what clues are found or what nefarious connections are discovered by the detectives, we know that this ending will be an unhappy one. So it's to Winterbottom's credit that A Mighty Heart remains a fairly compelling, if ultimately limited, tale of what might be the most high-profile civilian casualty in the war on terror.
Based on Mariane Pearl's memoir, the film centers on her anxiety and desperation during her husband's captivity and the valiant police investigation that attempted to find his whereabouts before time ran out. Notably missing is any depiction of Daniel Pearl's experience at the hands of his captors -- instead of trying to imagine what we are unable to know about his suffering, Winterbottom and his screenwriter, John Orloff, have opted to keep the focus on Mariane (Angelina Jolie) and those around her, relying on the infamous photos and email messages from the terrorists to convey Daniel's dire situation. As a consequence, the terror at the center of A Mighty Heart remains oblique -- outside of one interrogation scene, we are rarely exposed to the ideology that drives al-Qaeda's activities. Given Winterbottom's past credits (The Road to Guantanamo, In This World, Welcome to Sarajevo), you'd be forgiven for expecting A Mighty Heart to be a little more polemical. The film is far more about personal loss than politics.
Where it does succeed in being more than a typical hostage story is in its portrayal of the police work required to piece together the network of jihadis responsible for Pearl's kidnapping and execution. Much of the film is structured as a procedural, with a Pakistani police captain (The Namesake's excellent Irfan Khan) leading the team of investigators as they interrogate witnesses and suspects while Mariane and her support group of Wall Street Journal reporters conduct research and follow-up with Daniel Pearl's sources. (Pearl, played by Dan Futterman in the film, was kidnapped while researching shoe-bomber Richard Reid's connections to terror networks in Pakistan.)
It's worth noting that both the Wall Street Journal and the Pakistani investigative team assigned to the case come off quite well in A Mighty Heart; none of the complaints that Mariane Pearl has registered since her husband's death – most vocally in a 2003 Washington Post article -- are referred to in the film. We are left with the impression that the actions of those most closely involved were heroic, even if they were unable to forestall tragedy.
The tension of the chase and the numerous frustrations that hamper the police search are well-captured by Winterbottom, who uses his typical verite camerawork and abrupt scene transitions to convey the frantic and chaotic environment of Karachi. Less effective is the inclusion of scenes depicting the Pearls' marital bliss before the kidnapping; spliced in throughout the film to suggest Mariane's memories of Daniel, they come off as superfluous and do little to add to our understanding of either character.
I suppose that any review of A Mighty Heart must devote significant space and analysis to Angelina Jolie's performance in it -- and not merely her performance as Mariane Pearl but what it means for the greater Angelina Jolie performance as actress, celebrity, humanitarian, icon, et al. It is certainly not hard to see what attracted her to this role of a serious, cosmopolitan, political, and committed woman. And as Mariane Pearl, Jolie does an admirable job of channeling the resilience and determination that Pearl showed the world in her public interviews. But ultimately Jolie is too awkwardly cast to be completely convincing -- even at her most dramatically intense and impressive moment, when Mariane receives news of Daniel's fate, the artifice of Jolie's darkened skin, hairstyle, and French accent make it impossible to accept her as more than a capital A "Actor" pretending to be a woman in distress.
In many ways, her performance is much like the film as a whole -- impressive, compelling, but ultimately limited in depth. As a testament to Mariane Pearl's courage in the face of loss, A Mighty Heart is powerful. But in conveying something beyond that personal nobility, the film is disappointingly constrained. Daniel Pearl's death shocked much of the world; A Mighty Heart gives us the experience of the people closest to his story, but it doesn't quite show why his death mattered to the world around them.
