Based on Mariane Pearl’s account of her husband’s brutal murder by al-Qaeda operative Sheikh Omar Saeed, this is one of the best films I’ve seen all summer yet it is quickly disappearing into the late summer night as threequals, talking rats and John McClane gobble up audience attention. That’s too bad, because A Mighty Heart is a smart, well acted and directed police procedural that is very tricky about playing into and interrogating the spectator’s desire for justice and revenge (not to mention Western privilege). Sure, you know what’s going to happen, but the power of the film is in the details. At times disorienting, this film (shot in Winterbottom’s trademark documentary style) rarely slows down but carries the viewer into the discombobulating world that is Pakistan, cutting back and forth from Pearl’s affluent home (a makeshift headquarters for her and her associates as they wait for information) and the chaotic streets, restaurants and apartment buildings of Karachi where police search incessantly for witnesses and criminals.
On one level the film is about the breakdown of human memory as Winterbottom’s non-linear dramatic action jumps back and forth in time; his central character working throughout to recuperate those tiny moments so easily forgotten yet possibly all that will remain of her husband’s life. More importantly, however, the film appears to be about the breakdown of human rights, and, therefore, becomes a very interesting companion piece/intertext with Winterbottom’s 2006 examination of human rights abuses in The Road to Guantanamo. I felt a great deal of ambivalence while watching this, both turned on and repelled by the Pakistanis loose disregard for civil liberties as they diligently search for Pearl and his assailents (torturing the occasional accomplice or three to get what they want). It is a tricky, complicated film but it is also highly entertaining, riveting even. There are many fine performances. I very much liked Jolie’s work here. She rarely allows the camera to coalesce around her status as Hollywood star, playing scenes of high emotion almost outside the camera’s purview as Winterbottom captures important moments from behind or from the side of even missing said moments as Jolie moves in and out of the frame. My favorite performance by far was Irfan Khan’s unnamed role as a Pakistani police captain. Khan communicates so much information with small gestures and minute facial expressions; here is a man of obvious integrity who will do whatever it takes to find Pearl and redeem Pakistan’s international reputation, yet many of his actions are seemingly reprehensible (at least from the safely ensconced space of an American cineplex). And Denis O’Hare’s take on John Bussey, the deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, provides wonderfully subtle comic relief as his concern for Pearl and her unborn child leads him (in a smart little twist of gender norms) to fret and worry over Pearl’s sleeping and eating habits. Playing the role like a life-long bachelor, O’Hare’s sensitivity to domestic concerns allows the other women (Archie Panjabi also delivers a strong performance) in the room to focus on more important things. They probably should have released this in September.
i liked this very much. i found it intensely emotional, not just because of danny’s butchering or mariane’s loss, or not because of that at all — i mean, it didn’t seem to me that that was the focus of winterbottom’s effort, really. when he shows the tv footage of guantà namo’s detainees moved around naked and in shackles — these skinny brown men herded about like dangerous beasts — and presents the kidnapping of daniel pearl as a qui pro quo for the way pakistani prisoners are treated there, you know this films emerges from outrage rather than sympathy or pity. winterbottom, of course, knows a lot of gitmo, since he researched it for the road to guantà namo, and jeff is right, this films gains a lot from being watched as the second installment of winterbottom’s take on the war on terror.
the americans are clearly not sympathetic figures in this film. when a CIA person arrives to mariane’s house, she acts as if she owns the place, in spite of the fact that a considerable group of smart and determined people are working there and have done so for days. she unceremoniously orders the room cleared, and the mostly brown people who are in it look at each other puzzled, as if to say, “who is this person?” winterbottom truncates the scene, so we don’t know if they actually get out or not. confrontations are kept out of this movie, because winterbottom keeps it focused on police action and cooperative brainstorming about the main agents, not drama. but drama simmers just under the surface, and it’s one of the film’s virtues that its fast editing allows most scenes to be just brief allusions to what is going on, rather than representations of it. so you see khan, who plays the pakistani police captain, drive around and sit around a lot, and maybe run up flights of stairs or get into people’s houses, but you don’t have a real sense of the actual interrogations, except for a few occasions. the camera does not stop to follow the interaction between human beings except when it’s inside mariane’s headquarters. otherwise it’s fast fast fast movement, the captain’s frantic effort to get to pearl before he’s killed.
the drama is in the decision-making, not in the workings of police investigation. and there mariane is a cool, calm, deadly effective center, very much in charge of things, still there even after the arrogant CIA officer or the ludicrous and creepy US embassy guy bluster in and out. The US embassy guy is the only one who’s having a blast, anticipating lustily the way “they” do things here, meaning the rough and ready ways in which police are supposed to get information from people. but of course this supposed pakistani cruelty is always juxtaposed in the viewer’s mind to the absurd cruelty of the US in guantà namo and in other loci of the war on terror. so we are actually relieved to see that, here, the pakistani police seem at least to discriminate when it comes to torturing. unlike us, who are still stuck with 300 detainees only one of whom has been charged of anything, once the captain is satisfied that someone is not involved in the kidnapping scheme, he moves right on. there’s only one scene of torture, and it’s with a real baddy who quickly gives up the info.
i, for one, imagine guantà namo as such an appallingly irrational and vicious place, that the focused, concerted police work of the captain feels reassuring to me even when torture is used. all through the film, i couldn’t get the thought of the tipton three, obviously innocent yet locked up for years in guantà namo just for being silly boys who went into afghanistan at a really stupid time, out of my mind.
the scene in which colin powell announces to the world that he’s very, very sorry about pearl, but of course there’s nothing he can change with respect to the way people are treated at guantà namo, is chilling. not, of course, because we expect the US government to change its ways just to save a puny wall street journal reporter, but because, unlike mariane, we know that the US — or the president of the US — won’t change their ways for anyone, ever, period.
SPOILER
i thought the looong, squirmy scene of mariane’s shouting when she learns that daniel has been beheaded very effective. it’s not a heart stringer. it’s a very embarrassing scene. you want her to stop stop stop, but she goes on forever. and you feel exactly the way you’d feel as if you were in the room, made incredibly uncomfortable by the raw display of pain, by her lack of restraint, and by the stupidity of your presence, by your awkwardness in the face of such misery. you feel shitty because you realize, as it happens in such scenes in real life, that you are thinking of yourself rather than her, that your main desire is to stop your discomfort, not hers.
OVER
but you know, jeff, i would really have liked it if winterbottom had given us fewer shots of jolie’s magnificent lips. did he really need so many close-up of hers taken from the side? or am i imagining this?
one last observation. in the last frame before the credits, the film tells us that daniel pearl’s parents started an organization that promotes cross-cultural dialogue. that was the only moment in the whole movie when i choked up. in the last frame, the revenge motif goes belly up, and winterbottom’s critique of the hell the US have unleashed on the world becomes poignant and explicit.
Well, I saw this with Gio, and I didn’t like it too much. Mostly, I didn’t see what the film was about. Yes, it was clearly linking Guantanamo and the Muslim response; yes, it was showing us that “they” are not some seething ‘other’. But it seemed to do these things sooo subtly that it felt like it was barely doing them at all. It was as if it merely nodded in the direction of these themes.
With all Mariane’s reminiscences of times with Daniel, it seemed as if the film was trying to be about them – that it was a personal story. But as people they hardly came through at all. All their interactions were portrayed in such formulaic terms (“whatever you do, don’t lose that smile”, “is it possible to love someone you’ve never met” as he listens to the fetus within her) and again, so fleetingly, that it couldn’t have meant to be about them. And the scene of her extreme grief seemed so out of place in a film that always felt it was brushing its finger-tips over the surfaces of everything.
I suppose that in the abstract, it’s kind of cool to think of the editing style – where he jumps around all the time, and often shows scenes that have no particular dramatic significance. But in practice, I just found it a bit annoying.
At the end of the day, I just don’t get why I needed to see this story told in this way.
Nice post Gio. I do think you are imagining this. Yes, you can’t help notice the lips but Jolie mostly looks gaunt and tired and very, very pregnant. There is one close up in which the lines in her face and the dryness of her lips seems to undermine all notions of beauty and sexyness.
The moment when I really choked up was a throwaway moment; Mariane is really angry and upset and is yelling and rushes out onto her back patio to cool down and the ever-present Pakistani boy of the ever-present female domestic servant (who always seems to be on her hands and knees cleaning up the floor; and Winterbottom’s willingness to keep this family within the frame whenever he is able is certainly worth examining) looks up at her with concern and Mariane/Jolie quickly composes herself and strikes that beautiful smile for the boy’s sake–to defuse the moment. That scene was so well played–heartbreaking–and I just about nearly lost it . . .
re: jolie’s lips. i believe you that i’m imagining it. i didn’t find her sexy at all, btw. i think she looked a little bit ugly, in fact, especially with that absurd hair-do. but that, too, may be me!
the moment you mention is a very nice one. i think the little kid was a girl. i have to wonder why the camera returns to her/him again and again. it’s hard to put this little unfussed-over, almost feral (she never says a word, she never smiles) kid with the child mariane is expecting and who gets a lot of attention, both from the movie characters and from the movie director. but then the moment you mention humanizes her so suddenly and unexpectedly, you’re right, it’s really wonderful. mariane honors the little kid, acknowledges her fragility, her being a little kid, by not crying in front of her.
Your posts are so thoughtful; I fear my critique may be far less interesting. I didn’t enjoy this. Didn’t dislike it–was, really, mostly unmoved. I found myself wanting, wondering about a sense of focus: tonal, narrative, character. Instead, I felt awash in details; for instance, we are given in a montage and Mariane’s voiceover a quick synopsis of Sheikh Gilani, and then a few scenes later Asra (Archie Punjabi) is carefully scribbling what she knows in black marker on a dry-erase board, and the scene seems drawn out–we’re seeing someone working through the details we’d already been given. The whole movie felt like this to me. Maybe I’d read too much about the events and people, maybe I just wasn’t drawn in. Kris seems to be more invested than me…
… and it is certainly well-acted and relatively thoughtful. But its meticulous focus on the procedural struck me as misguided. United 93 kind of suffers from the same faults, for me, but succeeds because it hews so much closer and more intensely to the “genre” it is also undercutting or exploiting or reconceiving (suspense thriller). Untempted by the policing/investigation, I felt here a persistent desire to know more, and more in-depth, about so many of the people and circumstances along the way–Masud’s journalist friend at the jihadi paper who set Danny’s contacts up, Asra’s background and work, even that FBI agent who so arrogantly demands the room (in the scene Gio noted above). I can’t really disagree with anything Gio says about the politics of the film, but I’d rather a starker jab at such messages, and less multi-layered ‘objectivity.’
i watched this on my flight from minneapolis to amsterdam, and liked it far more than i thought i would (yes, i’m actually writing to the blog from schiphol–that’s what a 5 hour layover will do to you). mike, i think the focus on the procedural is necessary, because it becomes almost the only way to prevent the film from being swamped by emotional politics. it is a story we already know, the temptation to read it as a personal tragedy that becomes representative of a civilizational clash is very strong, and i think winterbottom undercuts those temptations by keeping us awash in details, off-balance. that said i too found myself admiring the film more than being gripped by it. but perhaps it is again undercutting that desire as well.
what i don’t understand though is why irfan khan is billed only as “captain” when he keeps saying his name (javed habib) over and over again in the film.
jolie was good too, but try as she might she can’t escape being angelina jolie.
we can’t be expected to understand such impossible foreign names and match them to their written equivalent! are you kidding? italian names, of course, don’t count as foreign.