“A Mighty Heart”
Rating: ★★★½
Everyone watched the news as it happened in January 2002.
Michael Winterbottom’s “A Mighty Heart,” which is based on the personal memoirs written by Daniel’s wife, Mariane Pearl, is valuable in showing what a headstrong, resilient woman Mariane was through these exhaustive events. It is far too easy to brush aside the tragic event as just another news headline. What a movie like this crucially does is to remind us of the effects it has to the people involved and what character it brings out.
The movie begins with a voiceover narration by Mariane (Angelina Jolie) explaining their work as journalists in
Director Michael Winterbottom deliberately chooses not to pump up the tension to excess levels in detailing the search for Daniel Pearl. He shoots his film in a straightforward documentary style as he did in his previous real-life based films such as “In This World” and the film is strongest in the second act when it turns into a police procedural of sifting through the terrible intricacies of terrorist networks around the country and across the globe. The writer, John Orloff’s screenplay is always clear in following through the trail of calls from Daniel’s phone to his contact to the next contact and so on. The sad thing about the whole ordeal is that, I think, the closer the intelligence operatives and police officers got to the main suspect via interrogations and even tortures, the more compelled the terrorists became to ultimately send a message of fear through the taping of his beheading.
The film’s success above all depends on the precise, measured performance delivered by Angelina Jolie. I have to say I have never been the greatest fan of Jolie after she got typecast in the dreadful “Tomb Raider” films and all the unnecessary camera mugging in and out of the big screen. But she is a real actress, as her Oscar-winning role in “Girl, Interrupted” abundantly proved. There has been some controversy regarding a Caucasian woman playing a person of mixed race (Mariane is of Afro-Cuban and Dutch ancestry), but whatever the case, I can say Jolie truly disappears into her role and lets the strength of Mariane Pearl shine through.
The most remarkable attribute about Mariane, who was pregnant at the time, is the calm resilience she maintained through the frustration of the investigation. There are a couple of moments when she flakes off a tear but she keeps a restrained, courageous front on the outside perhaps to not burden the Pakistani and American operatives who are already stressed to bring Danny home. It is heartbreaking to see how she maintained hope upon receiving pictures of her husband from the terrorists, since we already know the ultimate outcome of the situation. This makes her ultimate emotional breakdown more devastating when she finally hears the tragic news.
The movie is tasteful in not explicitly showing what ultimately happened to Daniel Pearl, as it should be. Mariane’s reaction to the tragic event is what stays with me most. When an interviewer asks whether she has seen the video, she sharply replies, “Have you no decency?” (A detail that is left out of the movie is her fight against CBS, which tried to broadcast the video of Daniel’s death). She makes clear in interviews the loss she feels but humbly never singles herself out to be a tragic heroine. She knows of the 230 other journalists who were killed during the time of
Within Mariane’s response to the incident, a moral victory can be claimed over the terrorists who completely lack common sense and choose cowardly tactics like harming an innocent. To witness a humble person who thinks with such sense and moral reason is what makes “A Mighty Heart” strangely uplifting. And it is how Daniel Pearl himself would want to be remembered.
0 comments:
Post a Comment