Film Review: "A Mighty Heart"

Shattering Story Is Told Astutely In 'Mighty Heart'

Jolie Is Fierce, Tender


By JOE MORGENSTERN

The Wall Street Journal

June 22, 2007; Page W1



Dan Futterman and Angelina Jolie in "A Mighty Heart"

Of the two powerful presences in "A Mighty Heart," only one gets star billing: Angelina Jolie gives a fierce and astute performance as Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and murdered by al Qaeda operatives in Karachi five years ago. The other presence is the city itself -- vast, throbbing with life, teeming with misery and, as depicted here, all but unfathomable to Westerners seeking to penetrate its secrets. This is a smart and serious film, however much it may also function as a star vehicle. The director, Michael Winterbottom, working from a script by John Orloff, has turned Mariane Pearl's memoir into a relentlessly intense drama about the search for her husband, as well as her search for meaning in his death. And the immediacy of the setting, heightened by documentary techniques, makes this a chastening film, a portrait of the explosive new world in which we live.

In her own portraiture, Ms. Jolie mixes tenderness with implacable toughness. She plays Mariane, a journalist herself and six months pregnant at the time, as a wife who loves her husband passionately, but a woman with no time or inclination for the niceties of behavior once it's clear he has been taken prisoner. At that point she becomes an obsessive organizer of the search, and a compulsive scourge of anyone who threatens to stand in her way. (One fatuous Pakistani functionary insists that the abduction is an Indian plot.) Given Angelina Jolie's celebrity, the obvious danger in such a take-no-prisoners style of acting was imposing herself on the real-life story, but that hasn't happened. To the contrary, the actress enters the character and stays there, even during her feral cries in the film's most harrowing scene.



Dan Futterman and Angelina Jolie in "A Mighty Heart"

Daniel Pearl is played by Dan Futterman (who, oddly in this context, may be best known as the Oscar-nominated screen writer of "Capote"). The reporter is seen fleetingly, at first, as he arrives in Karachi from Islamabad, then goes to his fateful meeting with a supposedly legitimate source for a story he was doing on the shoe bomber Richard Reid. I didn't know Danny, so all I can say about Mr. Futterman's performance is that it, and his physical resemblance to his character, seem persuasive. But Danny's character seems persuasive too -- not a hero of the war on terror, as some have sought to cast him, and certainly not the incautious naïf that others have thought him to be, but a first-rate reporter of maturity, reflexive decency, insatiable curiosity, reasonable prudence and unreasonable dedication to finding the truth of whatever story he might have been working on.

Against most Hollywood odds, Danny Pearl's tragically truncated life story has fallen into good hands, thanks to the film's producers (first among them Brad Pitt) and to the filmmaker they entrusted with the production. For much of the past decade Michael Winterbottom, who was born in England, has been refining his agile style in such extraordinary films as "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "In This World," and in last year's "The Road to Guantanamo." It's a style that integrates drama and documentary footage, mixes professional with non-professional actors and yields a sense of place that's as vivid as anything seen on TV news.

On one occasion the stylist stumbled. "The Road to Guantanamo" was long on immediacy but short on factuality. And one aspect of the technique here amounts to tacit editorial comment. Through the use of oppressive close-ups, quick cuts, film-noir peeks into labyrinthine neighborhoods and long lenses that compress the confusion of Karachi's streets into pandemonium, the director and his Danish-born cameraman, Marcel Zyskind, have made the city seem endlessly menacing. What would the same locales have looked like if they'd been shot by a Third World filmmaker?

Yet the film's point of view is inevitably that of an outsider, which Danny Pearl was, and menace is the essence of this shattering story, which has been told with skill and urgent conviction. "A Mighty Heart" makes the terms of the terrorist threat palpable.