A Mighty Heart

Michael Winterbottom has established himself as a monumentally eclectic film talent. Just last year he was behind the comedy farce Tristram Shandy and the political docudrama The Road to Guantanamo. This year his public profile has bounded off the charts with A Mighty Heart, an exquisitely intimate procedural drama detailing the events following the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reported Daniel Pearl through the the eyes of his wife Mariane, played by Angelina Jolie. Shot on location in Karachi and featuring some of the actual places where Pearl did visit and stay in his real life, A Mighty Heart does its best to avoid exploitation by means of vivid and precise storytelling. The objective is to very clearly and explicitly convey all the minute details of the investigation with as close a connection the actual events as creatively possible. Thankfully, Winterbottom has scraped away all opportunities for melodrama and created something even more gripping: an intensely personal fly on the wall look at Mariane Pearl's experiences in Karachi absent of devices and weepy theatrics.

It's fitting for the film to be unwavering and exact as this is very much the way Pearl handled her life following her husband's well publicized kidnapping and eventual murder. For most of the film Jolie performs the role with the utmost integrity and honesty. She doesn't wallow in the grief of a lost husband. She shows us Pearl's pain but she also shows us her resolve. During the bulk of the investigation (prior to the anguishing moment when she realizes that her husband is dead) we see her cry just once. To do so she runs out into the garden of the house in Karachi where she and Daniel were staying and turns her back to the camera. When she is done she brushes her tears away and mutters to a child playing nearby "so silly...so silly." And then she does the most unbelievable of things. She smiles.

There's no really great way to explain the power of the movie. It plays more as a real life experience than a film and what it does most of all is intoxicate you with a drive and hope to find someone everyone knows will never come home alive. Winterbottom's handheld, purposefully imperfect stylization and his collection of authentic shooting locations give you such a sense of the time and place that it feels often as if it were documentary film making at work rather than narrative. And it's not just the transformation of Jolie that does the trick on the performance side either. She's surrounded by deeply committed and passionate actors including Archie Panjabi as friend and fellow journalist Asra, Irfan Khan as the head of search mission in Pakistan, and Dan Futterman as Daniel Pearl.

There's such an amazing strength and agony at work here. Every scene is a false hope or a new disappointment. It's a story that almost everyone has lived through once before but here it is delivered as a deeply specific cinematic journey as told by the people who were actually involved. It's as tragic as ever, but coupled with a certainty, as spoken by Mariane herself, that Daniel Pearl was not the only victim of militant groups and would not be the last. It's so urgently his story, but there's a rich sense of complexity here that encompasses the unreal complications in trying to settle conflict between entities of opposing ideals.

Grade: A