Filming the story of the kidnapping and gruesome murder of Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl was a daunting challenge. Easy to politicize, easy to over
dramatize, easy to insult the awful reality. Director Michael Winterbottom, his
cast, and his crew have done it the hard way: they did everything right. “A
Mighty Heart” succeeds on every level.
Hewing
closely to Mariane Pearl’s book “A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My
Husband, Danny Pearl,” Winterbottom avoids fictionalizing the truth by working
in an understated documentary style. The movie is filmed on a dead run in
unrelenting urgency as the searchers who have gathered around Mariane Pearl work
against the terrorists’ deadline.
Set in the
chaos of Karachi, the film is tense and confusing. The streets are packed with
cars, people, and animals with little or no space for any of them to move. The
din is constant. Inside the Pearls’ house, the group that gathers to search for
Danny is equally bewildering, and it is nearly impossible to cut through the
confusion to get to know them. They are American diplomats, Wall Street Journal
executives, the FBI, the Pakistani police and colleagues of Mariane and Danny
Pearl. In their search, they tangle in one way or another with Pakistanis,
Indians, terrorists and an unfathomable mixture of religions and ethnicities.
The director’s deliberate chaos is a brilliant underlining of the extraordinary
complexity of the Middle East.
It is a world
of treachery and intrigue that the searchers simply cannot navigate. Imagine if
NY, NJ, DE, and CT all had competing cultures and divergent histories rooted in
centuries of hatred. Can any American grasp the cultural roots and landscape of
these countries enough to understand their past and present, much less their
future? It is the unidentifiable underbelly of that world that stole Danny
Pearl’s life, and they did it because he was an American.
Speaking in
the Cuban/French accent of Mariane Pearl, Angelina Jolie is entirely consistent
and comfortable with it, and therefore so are we. If Jolie’s natural elegance
and calm make her stand out, it is her obvious intelligence that makes her
portrayal so credible. Without a hint of overacting, she plays the loving,
pregnant wife of Danny Pearl with grace and does it so convincingly that we
trust her presentation of Mariane entirely. That is certainly the great gift an
actor can give an audience. It is largely this performance that gives the movie
its real world, unscripted feel. It’s time to stop confusing the off screen
celebrity with the deeply accomplished actress of this film.
Daniel
Winterbottom has told us Danny Pearl’s story without once stepping into the
minefield of potential flaws attending the real life drama of the story. When it
is over we are awash in authenticity, very sad, but also extremely appreciative
of the collective effort. A film that must have seemed impossible to make has
become a truly fine one.
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