A Mighty Heart (103 mins, 15)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom; starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irfan Khan, Will Patton, Archie Panjabi
Michael Winterbottom is probably the most versatile and prolific moviemaker this country has ever produced, his films ranging from versions of Hardy's Jude the Obscure to a portrait of Manchester rock impresario Tony Wilson (24 Hour Party People). In 1997, he brought the horrors of the Balkan conflict to popular audiences with Welcome to Sarajevo and these past five years he's made three films on different aspects of the post-9/11 world as it affects Afghanistan and Pakistan. The first, In This World, traces the desperate journey of two Afghan boys from a refugee camp in Pakistan to Britain. The second, The Road to Guantanamo, is about young British Muslims going via Pakistan and Afghanistan to detention in Guantanamo Bay. Now we have a powerful recreation of the kidnapping in Pakistan on 23 January 2002 of the 38-year-old south Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, and his subsequent murder by a terrorist group calling themselves the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. He was in a country where Jews are vilified and American reporters automatically suspected of being CIA agents.
The events are pretty familiar, though certain aspects were not clarified until later (only this year, the killer made a confession in Guantanamo Bay) and some remain obscure. The picture is based on a memoir by Pearl's French wife, Mariane, a radio journalist who accompanied him on his mission to Karachi. They were about to depart after his final interview with a man who purported to know about local associates of Richard Reid, the 'shoe bomber', and the links between al-Qaeda and the Pakistan secret service.
As someone says at the beginning, tracking a single man in one of the world's largest, most sprawling cities is a daunting task. But Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman), a scholarly, mild-looking, bespectacled figure, heads off by taxi to a rendezvous at the Village restaurant, safe because the encounter will take place under the public gaze. Instead of pursuing an elusive informant, Danny becomes the object of a nationwide search.
The picture is shot in a documentary style and seen almost entirely from the point of view of Mariane, a handsome, confident, articulate woman, six months pregnant and persuasively played by Angelina Jolie. The lighting is harsh and natural, the restless handheld camera is constantly on the move and the style is that of a thriller, though one where the outcome is known.
Mariane's initial worries over Danny's failure to return for dinner turn into serious anxiety. By the time an email arrives with ransom demands and a photograph of Danny with a gun to his head, she's surrounded by representatives of the FBI, the CIA, the Pakistani CID and colleagues from the Wall Street Journal, who set up a command headquarters in the carefully guarded house the Pearls have been renting. Amid the frenzy, Mariane remains cool, rational and, above all, hopeful.
The first response of the Pakistani Minister of the Interior was to attribute the abduction to an Indian plot to embarrass its neighbour, but when there's proof of abductors, the local CID springs into action and we're introduced to this bizarre, labyrinthine world where tenements without running water are connected by the web to global contacts and the latest technological achievements are the conduits for ancient barbarity.
As the cops track down the senders of the email, we see a police technician in a back street holding a bundle of telephone wires that might contain the clue to Pearl's whereabouts and all scruples are swept aside when email servers start talking about confidentiality.
Torture as an investigative tool is taken for granted as suspects are hung from the ceiling and electrodes applied to their genitals. Constantly on the scene is an intriguing figure called Randall Bennett (Will Patton), a senior American counterintelligence expert, bearded, a stud in his earlobe, always in a dark suit and tie and usually with a strange smile around his thin lips. He's present during the torture and when he accompanies a raid on a key terrorist's house, he remarks gleefully: 'God, I love this town.' This reminds one of Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore's: 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning' in Apocalypse Now. Bennett is now said to be in Iraq.
A Mighty Heart brings to mind two earlier political thrillers. The first is Three Days of the Condor (1975), in which the CIA, viewed somewhat balefully, has an office in the Twin Towers and a veteran operative, played by John Houseman, is asked about intelligence life in the past. 'It used to be more symmetrical,' he says nostalgically and this is the perfect comment on the so-called war against terror.
The second film is Costa-Gavras's fact-based Missing, a Cannes prizewinner in 1982, in which Jack Lemmon comes looking for his son, a radical journalist killed during Pinochet's anti-Allende coup, possibly by the Chilean secret police in league with the CIA. In an unforgettable moment after Lemmon hears his son is dead, we see him from behind as his legs buckle beneath a body grown unsupportably heavy with grief. In A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie finally cracks when she receives confirmation of Danny's death, goes up to her bedroom, and, again observed from behind, falls on her bed shrieking with pain.
Yet the movie is ultimately affirmative. Mariane, a Buddhist by religion, refuses to be terrorised by terrorists. The moments of repose in the movie are flashbacks to her happy life with Danny. She was married to a man without prejudice and in bearing his son, Adam, asserts her belief in the perpetuation of the quiet decency he represented.
