From the heart

Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart. (Peter Mountain/Paramount Vantage)

A Mighty Heart is a procedural with no hope for a tidy resolution. Set in Pakistan in 2002, it covers the weeks between the disappearance of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and his infamous execution. Pearl’s beheading at the hands of Muslim extremists, recorded and available online, became another signifier of the dizzying change in the world order, post-9/11. Neutrality and reason — the cornerstones of Pearl’s profession, and, idealists might say, of America — proved useless in the face of zealotry; those traits were, in fact, the official enemies of many.

And yet, A Mighty Heart — fast, brusque and staunchly unsentimental — is not a polemic. Though Pearl should matter now to all of us, his story is told by the one who mattered most to him, his wife, Mariane, whose memoir of her husband is the film’s source material.

Mariane Pearl is a journalist herself, and when many reporters were abandoning the hot spot of Karachi, the Pearls remained. The film holds fast to a vision of journalism as glamorous and uncorrupted, a job of shorthand and clandestine meetings with shadowy contacts, all to service truth. Pregnant Mariane (Angelina Jolie) is part Afro-Cuban, part French, a multi-culti global citizen who answers the narrowness of fundamentalism with a quiet determination to blow it to pieces via her word processor. Seen almost entirely in flashbacks, Danny (dead-ringer Dan Futterman) is loving and gentle, but with the same spine of fearlessness. A subject he’s interviewing casually informs him that the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by Jews, and then asks: “What are you, a Christian?” Pearl answers bluntly: “I’m Jewish.”

That exchange — an admission that may have helped paint a bull’s-eye on his forehead — rings in Mariane Pearl’s ears when her husband fails to come home after arranging a dangerous interview about “Shoe-bomber” Richard Reid. The film begins with Pearl's disappearance, and the rattle to life of the machine that will attempt to find him. Mariane is cool-headed and focused, piecing together evidence and leads with a marker on a white board like a forensics expert. The team around her is dedicated but murky, their motivations unclear. The U.S. consulate representative (Will Patton) has a cowboy swagger, murmuring that he wants “a front-row seat” at the torture sessions he assumes the Pakistani police will unleash on the kidnappers. The chief of the Pakistani investigation (the wonderful Irfan Khan, from The Namesake) is assigned to the Pearl case to rescue his country’s reputation, but Pakistan’s culpability as a harbour for al-Qaeda operatives hangs over the proceedings. Dead ends and red herrings make for a breakneck, breathless tension that’s always tinged with the sadness and horror of the inevitable ending.

Director Michael Winterbottom (Road to Guantanamo, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 24-Hour Party People), a man who never makes the same movie twice, taps exactly the kind of frenetic madness generated by a missing person case. The sheer work of the search — cellphone records and interrogations and e-mail tracking — is set against the ordinariness of life in a city, and a home. The Pearls lived colonial-style in an airy house maintained by locals: as the search churns on, the housekeeper sweeps the corners and the security men nod, sympathetic to their employer’s turmoil, exuding a fear of being implicated. The toddler child of a worker plays at the feet of the investigators, a constant reminder that Pakistan is not just a nation, but a nation of people with inner lives that veer in all directions.

Angelina Jolie, left, and Dan Futterman portray journalists Mariane and Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart. (Peter Mountain/Paramount Vantage)

The film’s liberal view — the word “dialogue” is uttered over and over, but “retribution” never is — clearly belongs to Mariane Pearl. A practicing Buddhist, she is not the powerless grieving widow the world might have expected. When Mariane appears on television to plea for her husband’s return, she ignores subtle pressure to capitalize on her swollen belly. Afterward, a producer whispers that she didn’t cry enough. It’s a dingo-ate-my-baby moment of pop culture persecution: How dare anyone (especially a woman) appear so controlled in a situation so out of control? But Mariane Pearl’s persona is uniquely anti-victim; she’s fierce, and devoid of the public, very American breakdowns that turn unspeakable tragedies into entertainment.

In this way, the casting of Jolie as Pearl almost makes sense: a beautiful iconoclast as a beautiful iconoclast. Jolie has certainly worked hard to nail the complicated accent, and her skin is appropriately baked, her hair Marge Simpson-high. But the essential Angelina Jolie-ness is hard to get past. When Mariane finally breaks, keening on the ground after learning of her husband’s death, you do think, ever so briefly, Hey, Angelina Jolie is keening! Not bad! Through no fault of her own, Jolie’s efforts as an actor can’t quite vanquish her life as a celebrity.

Perhaps this is another reason why Jolie was intrigued by the film (which her partner, Brad Pitt, produces): Pearl’s murder was broadcast on the internet, and so the story is also about spectacle, and the end of privacy. The film shows the murder only as a horrified reflection in the faces of those who discover the tape. While playing the execution would have been vile, somehow this particular alternative feels too restrained; surely there’s a halfway point between prurience and total abstinence. Winterbottom, usually a wonderfully inventive director, needed to allow us to experience the sheer evil of that act somehow, but this pivotal scene is strangely muted. The fact that Pearl’s murder did happen proves that we are not above evil, or exempt from it, and the film has to force us to confront this unconfrontable truth. But Winterbottom plays safe, unwilling to offend, even though, by God, we are already so very offended.

In the aftermath, Mariane Pearl tells a group of friends that she refuses to feel “terrorized,” rendering the murder pointless. It is a brave and strong stance for her to take personally, but maybe A Mighty Heart should terrorize the audience. This spring, the mastermind behind the murder, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed at a military tribunal: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head.”

Nothing in the film is as awful as that sentence.

At some point, A Mighty Heart really is no longer about Mariane Pearl’s path toward peace. At some point, it is about a very real present, broken and maybe unforgivable, a path that leads back to the murder of Daniel Pearl, and beyond.

A Mighty Heart opens across Canada June 22.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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