As I write this, BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has passed more than 100 days of captivity since his kidnapping. Yet he is presumed to be one of the lucky ones — likely he is still alive.
In the first half of 2007, 47 reporters and eight media assistants were killed doing their jobs. In 2002, Daniel Pearl, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter in Karachi, Pakistan became one of the unlucky ones himself.
In the nearly two weeks after he was kidnapped while investigating shoe-bomber Richard Reid’s Pakistani connections, and in the more than five years since his death at the hands of his al Qaida-linked captors, Danny Pearl has been transformed into that most overused of accolades: a hero.
He has been lionized as a crusading journalist and honored as a Jewish martyr, to the point of having his name added to the list of the mourned at a Los Angeles Holocaust memorial. A Mighty Heart is not a part of that process.
This comes as something of a surprise, given that the film is based on his widow Mariane’s memoir and, at the outset, is dedicated to their son, Adam, who was still in the womb when his father was murdered. But Mariane Pearl was and is a journalist first. In Iraq and Afghanistan she was a correspondent for French public broadcasting, while her husband was serving there as the Journal’s South Asian bureau chief.
In her account, Danny Pearl was not particularly observant and did not flaunt his ethnic heritage. When asked at one point how many people in Pakistan knew he was a Jew, her character (played impeccably by box-office magnet Angelina Jolie) says not many. She adds that he would tell anyone who asked him but would not bring it up on his own.
The film leaves as speculation whether his last recorded statement, “I am a Jewish-American,” was coerced by his captors for its propaganda effect. What it does clearly show was that Pearl’s main crime, in the eyes of the terrorists, was that he was an American and that the goal of his captors was political leverage.
In fact, the film is really not about Danny Pearl. Dan Futterman, who plays him, appears mostly in short flashback sequences. What is on display in these scenes are his love for his family, his good humor and a very reasonable sense of self-preservation. (He travels around Karachi asking for expert advice on whether it is safe for him to go to his final interview.)
The film is also not an occasion for political posturing on the state of the Middle East peace process, the War on Terrorism, or an occasion for oblique references to Iraq war policy and the Bush Administration’s handling of foreign policy. What A Mighty Heart is above all else is a police procedural — a kind of “Without a Trace” or “CSI Karachi” without the high-resolution bullet-tracing shots.
The assemblage of fellow journalists, consular officials and Pakistani police holed up in the house of Journal colleague Asra Nomani do what they do best. Nomani, an Indian Muslim reporter played by Archie Punjabi, keeps a white-board graph of Danny’s last moves and contacts.
The Captain (Indian film star Ifran Khan) a character representing the Pakistani civilian police, follows leads and directs the arrests and interrogations of suspects and connections along the way.
This being the real Pakistan, not a sanitized version meant to avoid offending diplomatic sensibilities, there are frank scenes of suspects being tortured to get them to tell what they know about Pearl’s condition and location.
Even these sequences, as difficult as they can be to watch, are offered up in the simple, cinema-verité documentary style director Michael Winterbottom has chosen. It is a decidedly low-key approach that allows the strength of the material to speak for itself. The audience is not cued by swelling strings on the soundtrack or erotically inspired close-ups to root for the cops or to pity the robbers. This is not Munich.
It is precisely the film’s plain simplicity, its abhorrence of on-screen violence, and easy answers that makes A Mighty Heart such a powerful film experience. Throughout the film the audience is taken on a trip not over the rainbow or into the heart of darkness. Its territory is the mind of a desperate and committed woman who cannot allow herself the luxury of sentimentality any more than she can afford to give up hope.
The city of Karachi plays its part in the movie, as well. While the interiors were shot in Pune, India as a security precaution, a number of exterior scenes follow cars and characters through the crowded and smoky streets.
Mariane Pearl’s determination to keep placing her personal tragedy in a broader context also comes through over the more than 1-1/2 hour runtime of the film. Pearl was an active participant in the adaptation of her book for the big screen and has been touring with Jolie to publicize its U.S. release.
Even the heroes are uncertain entities: Nomani, being Indian, is suspect in the eyes of Pakistanis. Will Patton does his usual fine job of portraying a U.S. consular official with shifting loyalties and unseen considerations.
In a television interview held in the wake of the video of Danny’s decapitation (which the camera gratefully cut away from at the last moment) and the discovery of his mutilated body in a Karachi cemetery, Jolies’s Mariane makes a point of noting how many other journalists have been killed or kidnapped in the same area during the same period. Then she allows her cool face to the world melt into frustration and anger at an ill-conceived question from the interviewer.
That determination to see this through to the end, even while recognizing the quixotic nature of the quest, are what brings the audience to the edge of its seats, desperately hoping for a happy ending. That remains true even though we know the inevitable conclusion as certainly as we know that the ship sinks at the climax of Titanic.