"A Mighty Heart"

This unmooring, bleakly beautiful film -- starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl -- gets to the essence of the unstable world we now live in.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Angelina Jolie, Reviews

Photo: Paramount Vantage

Angelina Jolie in "A Mighty Heart."

June 22, 2007 | Mariane Pearl's 2003 "A Mighty Heart," a memoir of her life with her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, and her efforts to locate him after his kidnapping by Islamic extremists in Karachi, Pakistan, in early 2002 -- a kidnapping that ended in his beheading -- is an almost unassessable book. Its clear-eyed vision notwithstanding, "A Mighty Heart" is so infused with personal pain that deeming it "good" or "bad" is nearly impossible: Daniel and Mariane had been married only a few years, virtual newlyweds, and Mariane was six months' pregnant with their first child. She opens the book by describing the morning of Daniel's disappearance, the sense of security and well-being she felt waking up nestled in his arms: "I love these sweet moments of oblivion and the peace they bring me. No matter where we are -- Croatia, Beirut, Bombay -- this is my shelter. This is our way of meeting the challenge, of confronting the chaos of the world."

That sense of one small, private world shattering within the larger and even more unstable one around it is the essence of Michael Winterbottom's unmooring, bleakly beautiful film version of "A Mighty Heart." There's no safety here: "A Mighty Heart" understands, deeply and intuitively, the nature of the changed and in some ways unfathomable world we now live in.

Winterbottom and his screenwriter, John Orloff, working from Mariane Pearl's book, interlace the story of Daniel Pearl's disappearance and the subsequent, desperate search for him, undertaken by Americans and Pakistanis working together, with vignettes of the couple's life together: The picture's rhythms are unsettling, shifting between lulling sequences steeped in domestic contentment and moments of raw horror and doubt, fragments of time in which Mariane faces the terror of realizing that she may never see her husband again. I suspect some people will view Mariane's story -- and the performance of Angelina Jolie, who plays her -- as heroic. And, within their extremely different parameters, both are. But at the core of this movie, and of this story, there's something both more somber and more fierce than any quality that can tidily be called heroism. In "A Mighty Heart," the link between the personal and the political is as vital, and as vulnerable, as an artery. Bravery is merely the ability to move from day to day without allowing yourself to become frozen with terror and fear, to try to forge a path through cultural mistrust and misunderstanding instead of conveniently around it. This is a direct and lacerating piece of filmmaking, one that not only recounts a specific event, but maps at least a small corner of a newly confounding and complicated world.

On Jan. 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl (he's played here by Dan Futterman, an actor whose demeanor is at once grave and elfin -- he was also the screenwriter for "Capote"), the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, left the house in Karachi where he was living with Mariane and a friend and colleague, Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), for a meeting with a secret source. [Editor's note: Salon sent Nomani to Pakistan as a correspondent; Mariane Pearl has written for Salon.] The meeting had been arranged by a go-between: A Western journalist can do nothing in Karachi without first establishing a reliable network of intermediaries. Daniel was researching a story on shoe bomber Richard Reid; he had managed to land an appointment with Mubarik Ali Gilani, a Pakistani cleric previously associated with Islamic militants. Randall Bennett (Will Patton), of the U.S. Consulate, advises against the meeting, although one of Daniel's local advisors, Kaleem Yusuf (Telal Saeed), suggests that Daniel will be safe as long as he meets Gilani in an open, public location.

Next page: False starts and dead ends