A Mighty Heart
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Sajid Hasan, Aly Khan, Irfan Khan, Denis O'Hare, Archie Panjabi, Will Patton
Genre: Drama
Rated: R
Review By:
Michael Dance
School:
NYU Tisch '07
Quote:
"...And hey, I met you. You are not cool." -Almost Famous
A Mighty Heart
Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Click Here For Our Interview with Angelina Jolie
Click Here For Our Interview with Dan Futterman
Click Here For Our Interview with Irrfan Khan
A Mighty Heart
I wasn’t looking forward to A Mighty Heart, a movie about a news story I vaguely remember, with a title that brings back too many memories of the syrupy emptiness of A Beautiful Mind. It turns out my fears were unfounded; A Mighty Heart is not a vapid life-affirming drama, like some ads make it seem, but rather a fully engrossing thriller.
And I really mean engrossing. Most movies you follow with general interest but are only too quick to forget on the trip home. I followed A Mighty Heart all the way through its sometimes Byzantine plot and was eager to learn even more about it once the film ended. It's fast-paced and shot in the style of a docudrama (the director, Michael Winterbottom, is a veteran of documentaries), and while plenty of facts go over your head before you can grab them, you actually want to go back and re-watch the film to see what else you can learn.
The key, I think, is that the main characters are in the same boat we are "” they're just trying to figure out what's going on, and their desire to do so pulls us through the film.
The time is January 2002. Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) and his wife Mariane (Angelina Jolie), both journalists, are temporarily staying in Karachi, Pakistan. In the process of doing research for a story on the "shoe bomber"Â Richard Reid, Daniel arranges a meeting with Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, a militant Pakistani cleric. He leaves for the meeting, which he arranged to take place in public, but never returns. When Mariane can't get a hold of him, she correctly assumes the worst.
What follows is the hunt for Daniel undertaken by Mariane, their friends at the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. FBI, and the Pakistani police force and newly formed Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS).
The acting is across-the-board terrific. The standout of course is Jolie, who really does affirm her status as one of the best actresses working today with a flawless performance. While Mariane's actual contribution to the search for Daniel is minimal, the fact that the film chooses to center on her never seems wrong-headed. Aside from the fact that the film is based on the real-life Mariane's book, she's the perfect choice because she's the strongest emotional attachment to Daniel. The film balances its plot-heaviness and documentary style with Mariane front and center as the human core, which gives the film a uniquely sturdy balance.
Besides, Mariane is hardly an emotional wreck throughout the film "” she is revealed to be a strong and astonishingly capable woman
The actual investigators, by the way, get plenty of chances to shine on their own. Leading the FBI is Will Patton as Randall Bennett, while Irrfan Khan plays the head of the ATS, known only as Captain. In one Jolie-less sequence that probably ran a full twenty minutes, Captain and his men hunt down three of Daniel's kidnapping suspects in, forgive the cliché, a desperate race against time. The suspense is palpable, and Khan in a sublimely solid performance reveals himself as fully capable of carrying the weight of a film all on his own.
Of course, in the back of your head, you're reminding yourself that the suspense isn't really palpable because everyone already knows the outcome. The problem with the film is that it's an unavoidable downer "” dozens of good people work tirelessly for weeks, and in the end, the outcome is still a tragedy.
Despite the authorities catching most of those involved, the entire ordeal just scratched the surface of the unfathomable mess of politics and religion in that entire region. One of the film's greatest strengths is that it unflinchingly helps us understand what things were really like over there at that time; the larger tragedy, beyond one man's life, is that things have only gotten worse. As Mariane herself states in the film, her husband was only one of numerous journalists to go missing.
Anyway. I'm supposed to be talking about the film, not ruminating naively on the larger political implications. A Mighty Heart succeeds so well partly because it gets you thinking like this, partly because it educates you about a fascinating true story, and mostly because it's simply top-notch filmmaking. The script is tight, the editing is fast-paced but unobtrusive, and the acting is utterly unmatched.
Movie Grade: A-
Synopsis:
Based on Mariane Pearl’s memoir detailing the terrifying and unforgettable story of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl’s life and death. The story covers Danny’s (Futterman) reasons for being in Karachi, Pakistan, the complete story of his abduction, the intense effort of his wife, Mariane Pearl (Jolie) to find him during the weeks following his disappearance and his eventual murder.
