Archive for June 25th, 2007

In A Mighty Heart, one scene reoccurs several times. Friends and family of Daniel Pearl, the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter, add to chart full of leads and links to his disappearance. By the end, the whole dry erase board is full of scribbles and arrows. It’s hard to determine what follows what.

The same could be said for the movie, an adaptation of Mariane Pearl’s best-selling book. Mariane (Angelina Jolie) and Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), married and with a kid on the way, were reporters based in Pakistan in the months after the events of September 11, 2001. Daniel left for an interview on January 23, 2002 and never returned, despite the frantic attempts of Pakistani and U.S. law officials and Mariane’s family and friends to track him.

Mariane Pearl has said that she meant the book to serve as a way for her son Adam to know his father, but Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation doesn’t come close to accomplishing her original mission. Instead, he spends a majority of the film on the search for Daniel Pearl. It’s hard to become involved in this subject when—unless you lived under a cave in 2002—you know Daniel Pearl’s fate, and when the same situation could easily befall an international reporter any day now. Does anyone remember what could have happened Jill Carroll?

Allow me to be clear. I’m not saying that movies should gloss over recent history, but in this case A Mighty Heart offers us little edifying information, the way a book like Lawrence Wright’s brilliant The Looming Tower did. And it doesn’t serve as a jarring reminder to honor heroes the way Paul Greengrass’ United 93 did. Again, the notable thing of A Mighty Heart is that we come out of it knowing next to nothing about Daniel Pearl. He was certainly brave, but how? What kind of husband was he? What was he like as a co-worker? Was he scared being a stranger in a hostile land? Any answers to these questions would have given us a new perspective on a tragic world event; instead it feels more like the glossy hooey of World Trade Center.

Jolie isn’t to blame here. She gives a sturdy, credible performance as Mariane Pearl. And she doesn’t look like she’s ready for a Maxim photo shoot, which was one of the many flaws of The Good Shepherd. (No circa 1950 housewives looked like her. Hell, how many housewives in 2007 do?) Through her coping of the day-to-day uncertainty of her husband’s future, coupled with a media blitz, we get some idea of what Daniel Pearl meant to her, even if the movie doesn’t clearly offer that.

RATING: (2 out of 4 stars)

Movie Website: