A Mighty Heart
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Starring:
Angelina Jolie - Mariane Pearl
Dan Futterman - Daniel Pearl
Archie Panjabi - Asra Q. Nomani
Irfan Khan - Captain
Will Patton - Bennett
There’s a lot of external nonsense that you should put out of your mind before seeing the wonderful but brutally honest film, A Mighty Heart. Forget that Angelina Jolie is playing Mariane Pearl, a woman of French-Cubano descent. Forget that even though Jolie’s an A-list star, the film is actually an ensemble piece. Forget all the mainstream media nonsense that assaults us on a daily basis as spin and rhetoric place the truth further beyond the distant locations covered in the news. Remove these distractions from your mind and let A Mighty Heart show the honesty of family and friends searching for the truth as they attempted to find Daniel Pearl (played by Dan Futterman), the Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered by jihadists while researching a story in January of 2002.
Director Michael Winterbottom deserves acclaim for avoiding the sensational while still charging the film with more honest energy than one would find in six ridiculous seasons of 24. While reporters clamor outside of Daniel and Marianne’s residence, everyone inside the home, both fellow journalists as well as Pakistani and United States government agents, fight vigorously for the truth in order to find Daniel. We live in The Information Age but as Heart demonstrates, the deluge of information and the ease at which it can be disseminated, makes finding the truth even more difficult. Obviously false stories, like Daniel being a CIA operative or fellow journalist and roommate Asra Nomani’s Indian origin making her a double agent of some kind, flood into the Middle Eastern media. And as the film tries to follow Danny’s timeline in an attempt to discover who may have kidnapped him, there’s a sad yet heroic subtlety to his story: no one in America would have probably cared about his report. It’s not sensational and it’s only a small piece of a much larger picture. But size and sparkle are matters of entertainment and Daniel Pearl and journalists like him were concerned not with popularity or making headlines but in making sure that they were in the business of revealing the truth. In a day where the mainstream media can’t seem to tear itself away from Paris Hilton’s incarceration, I hope we can all appreciate the nobility at the heart of a profession that has become perverted by corporate greed and governement manipulation.
In addition to bringing the audience’s focus back to the pursuit of the truth rather than the pursuit of distraction, the film should also help audiences remember that while Jolie gets most of her attention these days from either adopting, giving birth, or being in a romantic relationship with Brad Pitt, Heart serves as a reminder that she is also a tremendous actress, Tomb Raider films be damned (seriously; damn them). She is the heart of A Mighty Heart and while the rest of the ensemble tends to focus the story and bring us into the intricacies and intrigues of finding Daniel’s captors, Marianne serves to humanize the story and make it more than a story that was ripped from the headlines.
My only real complaint with the film is that the intense search for Daniel leaves most of the characters as either saints or sinners. Such stark characterizations tend to be in sharp contrast to the complexity of the larger story Danny was attempting to cover and what Winterbottom demonstrates as he navigates a vast network of possible terrorist suspects.
A Mighty Heart is a difficult film and one that requires a removal of expectations, not to avoid disappointment, but rather to better understand the truth and avoid distraction. While the film can’t always live up to the journalistic efforts of its protagonists, Jolie’s centering performance and Winterbottom’s assured direction keep a firm grasp on the film’s emotional truths.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
6.10.07