a mighty heart

Knowing well that I was risking a night of almost certain depression, last night April and I went to see a preview screening of A Mighty Heart (Dir. Michael Winterbottom), the drama based on the search for and murder of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and featuring Angelina Jolie as his wife Mariane. I'd heard a bit about the film beforehand, mostly comments about Jolie--e.g. some questioning of her suitability for the role and suggestions that she was too big a star for the film, that her celebrity might taint the integrity of the story, plus some rumors that Jolie used artificial bronzer so her skin tone would closer approximate that of the Cuban-French Mariane. And, of course, I also knew the story of Daniel Pearl in that oblique way I know about most headline news.

We all know how the story ends, we can imagine how the story begins, but, as the tagline of the film tells us, "this is the story you haven't heard." And, surprisingly, it's true. I think, if nothing else, the film embodies the harrowing uncertainty and claustrophobia (as one of my friends described it) of military and police investigations. As Mariane's house becomes the center of operations in the search for her husband, the growing number of computers and printers and ringing cell phones serve well to signify the intricate, violent, convoluted turmoil of war and terrorism.

While we may know the ending, it is very clear from her steadfast optimism and her cautious hope that Mariane does not, and I think this is something that Jolie conveys extremely well. (By the way, I quickly got over "Angelina" and came to focus on her as "Mariane," and I don't agree at all that she's too big for the picture. This could be a potential problem with almost any big-name actor, and it's up to the actor to embody their role so fully that you believe. And Jolie does this.) In fact, all the actors were excellent--from the Police Captain played by Irfan Khan (also in The Namesake) and Archie Panjabi as fellow reporter and friend Asra Q. Nomani to an ensemble of recognizable and not-so-recognizable others whose acting, overall, was understated, dramatic and heartfelt in all the right ways.

On the whole, I think the film does what it sets out to do--tell an untold story--and somehow manages to do this without being totally over the top. Discomfiting camera angles, slightly grainy film stock (unless that was just my imagination), and crowded, tightly-framed scenes imbue the film with a continual aura of anxiety. While it, fortunately, doesn't strive for the over-dramatic or the graphically-traumatic, the film also doesn't shy away from despair when the time comes. Most of the film is just quietly heartwrenching, but Mariane's eventual breakdown is so visceral it made me want to look away from the screen, and yet it felt completely appropriate, even necessary, and such a hauntingly-stark contrast to her previous hopeful vitality that this scene all but made the film for me.