Film

A Mighty Heart (2007)

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Synopsis

Is Michael Winterbottom British cinema’s busiest polymath? The director’s 15th feature in 12 years is an adaptation of Mariane Pearl’s memoir of her late husband, Daniel Pearl, the journalist kidnapped and killed by militants in Karachi. Filmed in India, Pakistan, France and the US, it stars Angelina Jolie (above) and Dan Futterman.

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Journalist Mariane Pearl has never seen the video of the barbaric murder of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, at the hands of Islamic jihadists. Undoubtedly, a baser director than Michael Winterbottom would have shown, if only for a nanosecond, the decapitation that’s still only a mouse click away. Taking his cue from Mariane’s memoir, Winterbottom (no stranger to the “War on Terror”—see last year’s The Road to Guantánamo) wisely structures A Mighty Heart like a procedural. The desperate hunt to find Danny Pearl (Futterman) unfolds as a rapid-paced accumulation of details: cell-phone towers, ISPs, color copiers, the names and arrows added to the dry-erase board that serves as an information map for Mariane (Jolie) and her husband’s WSJ colleague Asra Q. Nomani (Panjabi).

For all those (myself included) who were highly skeptical about casting globe-trotting mama Jolie as the astoundingly dignified Mariane Pearl: The actor is more than good. The wig, the skin bronzer, even the spooky brown contacts quickly diminish in their weirdness after the first ten minutes, when we’re completely won over by Jolie’s conviction. Playing someone reared in Paris, Jolie’s lingual skills are extremely limited—her only French is “Merci,” “Au revoir,” and “C’est bon?” But again, even language is rendered completely insignificant during the scene that may be the highlight of Jolie’s career: a piercing wail after Mariane learns that Danny has been killed. Never showboaty, it’s a cry that articulates the unspeakable horror of a personal tragedy in a world gone crazy.

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