A Mighty Heart is a tough movie to go into. Since we already know how this story ends, the filmmakers need to rely on something other than plot. The story has to be elevated somehow, the emotional quotient has to be amped up, and the performances have to carry all of the dramatic weight to make the movie have some sort of substance.

The story of Daniel Pearl is one loaded with emotion and sadness, and it would be easy for the director and writer to sit back and let the emotion of the situation carry us through. Fortunately, director Michael Winterbottom and star Angelina Jolie do not let this happen. The end result is not perfect, but it is a powerful story of love and loss in a fast changing world.

There have been a few movies over the past couple of years that told stories that we all know the ending to and proved to be emotionally draining experiences. What is tough about this type of films is that it is easy to get caught up in the real emotion related to the actual events rather than how successful the film is at telling the story and letting a finely crafted film draw out the emotion more organically.

Two such recent films are The Passion of the Christ and United 93, however neither seems like a good example of a film that relies on the real emotion, as they are both well made and powerful films, and would be in the same category as A Mighty Heart in how well they are crafted. A better example of a film in the other category would be World Trade Center, which, when viewed objectively, is rather generically directed. There is nothing special about that presentation, however the true story behind the events supplies the emotion, along with Nicolas Cage's performance. Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that films that we know the ending of need to have strong performances and strong direction to give it meaning beyond the telling of the story.

The film is based on the memoir of the same name written by Mariane Pearl, and it recounts her experiences of being in Karachi, Pakistan with her husband Daniel. Daniel was working on a story and it was leading him to meet with Sheik Gelani, a meeting which turned out to be a smoke screen as he was kidnapped by a terrorist group. However, we are not told any of his story with the terrorists, what happened when he went to meet his contact, and we never see his fate, nor the videotape that was released. This is primarily the story of Mariane Pearl and the horror that she had to deal with, and the strength of character and heart that she possesses. This is a story that is firmly centered on Mariane Pearl.

Angelina Jolie, handpicked by Mrs. Pearl, stars in the film, and gives what may be her finest performance. She is not the usual sobbing hysterical wife out of control of herself in the face of such a tragedy; rather she remains cool, calculated, and incredibly strong. She is a woman who knows what is at stake and is able to control herself in the face of such a dire situation. Jolie commands your attention with her powerful and moving characterization. I know I stopped seeing Jolie and only saw Pearl; she disappeared into the role and centered the humanity of this story.

The film is shot in a way that looks very much like a documentary. We, the audience, are like flies on the wall, bearing witness to the investigation and the various personalities involved. It is a very intimate film as Michael Winterbottom gets us right in with the actors, lots of closeups, never letting us get a breather. It is a well crafted thriller that doesn't rely on action, gunfights, and explosions, but rather the human drama involved. I admit that there were many times that I could not keep the characters' names straight, but even without knowing the names, I never had any trouble following what they were trying to accomplish.

A Mighty Heart is a triumph of a film that gives us incredible human drama, a tense story that keeps you at attention, even knowing the ending, and is, at its heart, a story of the love between Mariane and Daniel. It is a movie that does not belittle what happened, nor does it aim to make Daniel or Mariane a hero; it does give us a story that is free of the politics that you would expect to see, and also aims to put focus on the continuing ongoing tragedies that are occuring in the Middle East.

Bottom line. This is a story that was only able to be brought to the big screen due to the involvement of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and to them I am thankful. Together with Winterbottom and screenwriter John Orloff, the film is dramatic, emotional, and well crafted. It does a great job of bringing Mrs. Pearl's story to the screen.

Recommended.

Christopher Beaumont spends much of his time writing about entertainment when he isn’t sitting in a movie theater. He is known around the office as the “Movie Guy” and is always ready to talk about his favorite form of entertainment and offer up recommendations. Interests include science fiction, horror, and metal music. His writings can be found at Draven99’s Musings, as well as Film School Rejects.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 8:53 am and is filed under Celebrity Gossip, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I am sure that most of you are familiar with the story of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped, very likely tortured, and finally beheaded by Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan. Five years after the brutal and pointless event, director Michael Winterbottom brings the story to the big screen.

It was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch this movie; the potential for a two hour festival of gore was looming large. My fears were completely unfounded. The movie is based on Mariane Pearl's (Daniel's wife) book of the same title. The sad events surrounding this inhuman and unnecessary piece of recent history are viewed through her eyes. The director has done a fine job of neither glorifying nor gorifying the story.

Angela Jolie plays a convincing and totally believable role as the distraught and frustrated Mariane. In the scene where she finally learns of her husband's brutal death, Jolie produces some of the best acting I have seen in a very long time. While this movie was in the production stage there was lots of 'grumbling' from the 'experts' about how Jolie did not have the depth to play this part. Well the 'experts' were wrong.

Daniel Pearl is played by Dan Futterman, and a fine job he does. We get to meet Danny mostly through flashbacks from happier times. We walk away knowing that he was a loving husband, and a ‘dog with a bone’ when it came to a news story. Maybe the saddest part of this whole story is that the Pearls were due to leave Pakistan the day after Danny was kidnapped, Mariane was six months pregnant and it was time to leave. A Mighty Heart also explores some concepts that we in the west may not be familiar with — the huge rift between Pakistan and India, and maybe even more interesting, a brief look into the Al Qaeda organization, and how it uses ‘compartments’ — if you break into one, you do not break into the next.

A Mighty Heart is rated R for strong language, but even with that edited out, it is not a movie for youngsters. It is very deep, and very sad. It opened on June 22, and I think it will do very well indeed.

Even though this is not a chick flick, my co-reviewer Jan (my wife) and I give this one two wet hankies!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Celebrity Gossip, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I went to see A Mighty Heart today because I wanted to be convinced that Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl would work. It didn’t. Not for me.

If I could describe this movie as a food, it would be chop suey. It's a mixed-up mess of events. I could follow much of the police action because I’ve read the book, seen the many interviews, and watched a CNN special that traced all the known events and people behind Pearl’s kidnapping. The average person does not really care about the Muslims, the terrorists, and the city that filled most of the scenes. What they came to see – a personal drama about two extraordinary married journalists – is missing. This movie is not about love, or family. Sorry folks. It's about Angelina.

Director Michael Winterbottom makes Karachi, Pakistan the star of the film and forgets all about building up some emotion and good will for the couple the movie is supposed to be about. I would have completely reversed the order of the movie and made the end the beginning, and then continued from there. I was sorely disappointed that the wedding scene and the little bit of life in Paris was relegated to the very end of the film. This was a huge miscalculation on the director or the editor’s part.

Why? Because here would have been the place where something could have been inserted about Daniel Pearl, a man from a family with deep Israeli roots — scenes and sentiments that would make him a real person who once lived, loved, and later died a horrible death, publicly. It would have also brought Mariane to life. Here is a woman who has a deep-seated Buddhist faith and is from a multi-racial, multi-ethnic background.

Less city, more people. Most of the film’s action takes place in the house, and the city of Karachi. Mariane, in the film and in life, clung to her faith when the Muslims around her stopped for one of their five daily prayer times — she would go to her Buddhist altar and repeat her mantra. Through my boredom, I finally got a good sense of this movie. It was during one of the many moments when the cast was sitting around the table in the rented house. I realized suddenly that this is a movie about some well-meaning foreigners having Angelina over for dinner, night after night. She's the guest in this movie! She is never integrated — only a megawatt star with magic and Meryl Streep caliber could have convincingly cooked and served up the Cuban-style dishes.

The good news comes in the form of Angelina’s accent. It's good. And it helps, but the effect — I was left missing the real Mariane. I missed her Buddhism, and I missed her blackness. I think casting Jolie in this role was a big mistake. And the only thing that I can compare it to is Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006). If he had taken a role in his film, that would have been a mistake, too. One of the raves about that movie was the native cast. As for emotion here: it registers nada, zilch, zero, nothing that I could detect. It's style over substance as usual.

In the end there is no dessert with this dinner. Instead the audience is stuck with a predictable meltdown from Mariane when she learns of her husband's death.

That would be fine, but in this movie it is simply out of place. It doesn't fit with the cool documentary-drama style Winterbottom maintains throughout the film. While the directing of this movie would best be described as chop suey, there is a small fortune cookie with the meal. The fortune is good. It comes in the person of Irrfan Khan (The Namesake). He plays the Captain, the chief of Pakistan's counterterrorism unit. He steals the show. Overall, the cast in this movie holds its own. They do not upset the cart. My advice: wait for the DVD or read the book. My Grade: C-.

Rated: R for language
Genre: Drama
Run time 1:48 min
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan
Based on the book A Mighty Heart by Mariane Pearl

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Celebrity Gossip, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Taken from the front pages of the world's newspapers is the story of the kidnapping and beheading execution of Daniel Pearl, the South Asia Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal. As seen through her own eyes, and as told in her memoir, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, this film recounts these events from the perspective of Mariane Pearl.

On January 23, 2002, the six months pregnant journalist Mariane Pearl's (Angelina Jolie) life changed forever. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) was researching a story on the shoe bomber Richard Reid when leads drew him to Karachi, Pakistan. Here a go-between had promised access to an elusive source, Kaleem Yusuf (Telal Saeed) to discuss his meeting with Sheikh Gilani (Ikram Bhatti). As Danny left for the meeting, he told Mariane he might be late for dinner. He never returned.

As the story unfolds, the desperate hunt for Danny starts without any information. The story moves at a quick pace, as investigators search for information from cell phone towers, ISPs, color copiers, and informants. Seasoned international journalists with formidable investigative skills are left clueless.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency (I.S.I.) is fully briefed on Pakistan's proliferating terrorist cells while the byzantine bureaucracy swamps the city in their search. After five harrowing weeks and a media frenzy, they find the kidnappers. This is the meat of the movie as the cloak and dagger scenes examine the shocking world of politics, religion, and war. Finally, Mariane is given the devastating news that Danny has been brutally murdered.

I was leery of the casting of Angelina Jolie as Mariane, but I was wrong to doubt her. She is outstanding as well as dignified without diminishing the character of the Pearl family. The scene where she learns of Daniel's death is one of her best performances — she gives out a heart-wrenching cry that is unspeakably real. This film manages to respect its source material without losing its direction.

In the five years since Daniel Pearl's death, nearly 230 journalists have been killed in the line of duty.

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Running time: 120 minutes
Release date: June 22, 2007
Genre: Drama, Adaptation and Biopic/Docudrama
Distributor: Paramount Vantage
MPAA Rating: R

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Celebrity Gossip, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.