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Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Michael Winterbottom.
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi
Description: In early 2002, the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl at the hands of terrorists shocked the world. Working from Mariane Pearl's memoir, director Michael Winterbottom investigates the chain of events leading up to the abduction, and the subsequent fight by Mariane and journalistic colleagues to secure Daniel's safe release.
Country: US/UK. 2007. 107mins
Grief: Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl
Filming a story the ending of which everyone knows, is not easy. But Paul Greengrass managed it pretty well with United 93. And if the prolific Michael Winterbottom doesn't achieve quite the same success with his docu-drama about the real-life kidnapping and eventual beheading of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist, in Pakistan, A Mighty Heart is still a fine companion piece to his Road to Guantanamo.
In that film, a trio of British Muslims found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this, it is an equally innocent Westerner who does the same. We don't see much of Pearl (Daniel Futterman) but we do see a lot of Angelina Jolie as his courageous and capable French-Cuban wife, Mariane, as she urges the Pakistan authorities on with the help of Asra (Archie Punjabi), her faithful friend and fellow journalist.
It is a performance that allows few concessions to her star persona, and her final howl of grief when she understands that the battle is lost is appropriately moving.
Aside from casting Jolie, the bravest decision was to shoot largely in Karachi. The risk pays dividends with highly evocative location work that allows you almost to the smell that crowded city and feel the chaos. No wonder it proved impossible to find Pearl.
The other notable member of the cast is Irfan Khan, last seen in British cinemas as the father in Mira Nair's The Namesake and dominant again as the head of counter-terrorism who did his best to find Pearl by tracking down the contacts he made on the night before he vanished. He and the others had to listen while the Pakistan Minister of the Interior claimed that the kidnapping was a plot by Indian intelligence to discredit his country.
Further rumours that Pearl was either a CIA or a Jew attached in some way to Mossad complicated the investigation, and Winterbottom details it all with what can only be called a furious energy.
You have to be sharp to take in all the information and the speed of it all makes it hard sometimes to empathize with the characters. But it's all the better for not being anything like your conventional Hollywood film, even though that might have been an easier watch.
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Having read the book by Marianne Pearl, I was wondering how such dramatic, tragic moments in her life could be rendered on screen, without falling into teary tragedy. Well, Winterbottom always keeps a sure rein on too much emotions that could sink the narrative and indeed manages to make us go through the awful happenings with great restrain and decency. So much restraint in fact that I came out boiling that such a tepid film fail to highlight the barbarity of the self-righteous monsters who beheaded Daniel Pearl. I know that Marianne has a generous and kind heart, mighty indeed, but I cannot somehow believe that soft, peaceful words of 'understanding' and forgiveness will ever remedy the terrible hate and utter madness we are dealing with.
So in the end you wonder why bother? Who does this film help ? The fact that Marianne was not the only bereaved wife and that hundred of journalists and innocent people are blown daily by these madmen certainly does not make right nor should it be perceived as a 'fatality' as the film tends to conclude. 'He was doing his job of journalist, they were doing their job of terrorists' Well, no, I don't agree with that at all.
- Josephine Thalbach, London
Morning:
13°c
