Un cuore grande

Michael Winterbottom brings us the true story of Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman). It's January 2002, the Wall Street Journal reporter was captured by terrorists when he arranged an interview with a fundamentalist cleric. His wife Mariane (Angelina Jolie) immediately initiates a frantic search.

Two things stand out in this movie. The eerie realism and the scary setting this movie exists in. The Pakistani part of the movie is especially stunning. You can almost feel the energy coming from the streets. The second is Angelina Jolie. She really transform herself, and shows that she is a real actress with skills.

Though based on a horrifying and tragic event, "A Mighty Heart" is a strangely unmoving film. Director Michael Winterbottom throws plenty of details at us about the investigation into the kidnapping of journalist Daniel Pearl by radical Muslims in Pakistan, and the film plays almost like a documentary, even copping the documentary look with lots of hand-held camera shots and jump-cut editing. But the human story gets buried underneath the complex web of details, and despite a solid performance from Angelina Jolie as Pearl's remarkably stoic wife Mariane, I wasn't much moved by the film.

Winterbottom doesn't display a lot of skill at making the details coherent to his audience, and I'm not sure even now who all of the players were or what role they played. He assumes that everyone will already come to the film knowing the story of Daniel and Mariane Pearl, and while I knew the general outline, I wasn't aware of all the specifics, and this film doesn't help. It recreates the feeling of coming into a T.V. series after having missed the opening episode, and trying to digest material without being able to put it into context.

Grade: B

"A Mighty heart" is a "realistic" movie, that tells a thru story, based on real events and including real people of real life. The movie is actually an adaption of Mariane Pearl's diary, where she tells the story of her husband, the journalist Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. The main question for the director Michael Witterbottom was to find the right representation of the reality he depicts. And the choices he made for the movie are both logical and disturbing.

Mariane Pearl, as her husband, is a journalist, and the first form the movie adopts in order to deal with the complex reality of the world is a journalistic style, with a camera always on the move. It really looks like a war reportage for television, that sticks to the events and to the characters in an "emergency"'s style. But surprisingly, this realistic aesthetic also reminds a famous fiction's show about terrorism : "24". And it's especially striking when it comes to action or interrogations (read torture...) scenes, with a Pakistan's Jack Bauer's style cop. If the goals of the directors are not the same ("24" only wants to be entertaining, "A Mighty Heart wants to be more...), and the depiction of terrorism differs ("24" is a show about fear, "A mighty heart" avoids a fear treatment), it's the same need to show every aspects of a situation that creates this similarities in the urge of the mise en scene.

And this depiction of reality, that gives an objectivity feeling to the movie, is a little bit strange when you come to consider that the movie is firstly an individually and personal point of view on a situation. An between the two opposite points of view (the subjective story of Mariane Pearl, and the objectivity of the "24" reality representation), Witterbottom seems to have some difficulty to choose. It really gives to the movie an annoying ambiguous point of view, where you're unable to really understand the nature of the images you're watching. And that's an important question in this kind of movie.

This ambiguity is quite surprising, for Winterbottom seemed to have chosen his style in his previous movies. For a completely different subject (the musical English scene from the Punk to the Techno in Manchester) in "24 Hours Party People", he clearly made his the Ford's sentence about reality that you find in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" : "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend". And this lack of a strong orientation in "A Mighty Heart" also gives the unpleasant feeling to watch the spectacle of a life more than a testimony about it, and to be an intruder in Mariane Pearl's intimacy, even if the movie claims the contrary.

This is one of the more intelligent and well constructed movies of 2007 thus far. Touching on the human element as it collides with the unpleasant realities of hot-bed issues including politics and religion, the brutality and evil this story depicts is at times difficult to watch.

Difficult to watch because the content is disturbing, which is the intent of the film. We see a very human dimension to the real life characters who are depicted sensitively, making the grotesque outcome all the more horrifying. The story is fair to the innocent parties involved, and honest in rightfully assigning the blame to those responsible for these heinous acts. Dramatically and artistically, this is a superior movie.

Angelina Jolie's portrayal of Mariane Pearl feels sincere, but she appears miscast. Little dimension is brought to her real-life subject, a woman inexorably thrust into the limelight amidst painful circumstances. The film would have been better off with another actress in this challenging role.

Still, the movie is outstanding, and worthy of your time.

Telling the truth is generally considered to be the first step on the path to righteousness. It brings redemption to some and relieves the guilt of others. Many people have a hard time accepting the truth when faced with it. That difficulty in dealing is perhaps the main reason some run far away from the truth altogether. Given how troubling facing the truth can be in everyday reality, being subjected to it in celluloid on the big screen is a very hard sell. This is even more relevant when the film in question is based on an event that was played out to the point of emotional exhaustion in the media. (Just ask the producers of UNITED 93.) This is the plight of A MIGHTY HEART, an adaptation of Mariane Pearl's novel of the same name, about her experiences during the search for her kidnapped husband, Daniel Pearl, in the winter of 2002. For director Michael Winterbottom, this is only the beginning though. Assuming he manages to get people to see the film, (casting Angelina Jolie in the role or Marian Pearl certainly doesn't hurt the film's chances), Winterbottom must then get people to forget that they know how it's all going to end.

Winterbottom is too smart to go against the grain. Instead, he uses the audience's prior knowledge of the story to incite an even deeper emotional reaction. He begins by establishing his style. A MIGHTY HEART is not a documentary but rather a fictionalized reenactment of actual events that is shot and edited like a documentary. There are no talking heads but the camera is an active participant in the drama that unfolds. Hand-held movement, jump cuts and an omnipresent observer's point of view lend realism to the film's already tense premise. For those who aren't aware, Jewish-American journalist, Daniel Pearl (played here by CAPOTE scribe, Dan Futterman) was kidnapped in Pakistan in January of 2002. The violent act became an international scandal as the group that claimed responsibility for the crime demanded the liberation of prisoners from American detainee prison, Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba. The American government does not give in to the terrorists' demands. It doesn't end well. The film focuses on the efforts made by Mariane, the Pakistani police, the C.I.A. and the journalistic community throughout the search for Daniel. Knowing Daniel doesn't live through the ordeal and that this search is fruitless may leave the audience without hope but the dedication and fervor with which the case is attacked carries enough hope to inspire an overwhelming sympathy that sinks our hearts when what we know is coming actually comes.

A blustering soundscape and tightly framed street and crowd shots elevate stress levels to unimagined heights. Mariane is alone in a foreign country, searching for the most important person in her life. Knowing the odds are against her, holding on to hope becomes all the more complicated when she is surrounded by strangers, traffic and the sounds of incessant honking, cell phones and random farm animals. The chaos is absolutely inescapable. Yet still, Mariane must remain calm. After all, she is the heart of this operation. If her heart fails, all hope is lost and all efforts will fall apart. Jolie exhibits both outer strength and inner fragility at the same time as Mariane. She is direct and focused in face of this horrific reality, holding it together for Daniel, herself and her unborn child but Jolie's distant eyes and suddenly fidgeted demeanor suggest just how difficult maintaining all this composure truly is. Being a journalist herself, Mariane's most endearing quality is perhaps her ability to remain hopeful in spite of all the horror she has known in her own career without coming across as naïve. Jolie's balancing act upon such a tightly wound rope is truly genuine in both its intention and execution.

Any movie entitled A MIGHTY HEART cannot spend all its time entrenched in fact. After all, there is a delicate, growing love between Daniel and Mariane that is also being held prisoner. This love though cannot be held captive and gives life to hope. Their love comes back to Mariane in flashes throughout her suffering. Insignificant moments like the last time they saw each other take on new meanings, making the loss feel larger while still reminding her what she is fighting to find. The truth behind A MIGHTY HEART is that it takes one to live through something like this and, more importantly, live past it.