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.