A Mighty Heart was released in
The film¿s name is drawn from the title of the book written by Mariane Pearl. It suggests that the film is about Daniel Pearl, the man. Instead it turns out to be a whodunit, a suspenseful uncovering of what happened to this scribe in search of a story.
Which, when you consider the opportunities the canvas presented, is such a pity. All an American audience is likely to take away from it is an almost-soppy tale of a white woman who loved and lost in a land rife with terrorism, but did not lose her compassion. After all she does kiss the maid¿s little daughter tenderly when she is leaving. It tells you nothing of what a journalist like Daniel Pearl was seeking to explore, or what moved him to risk his life just months after 9/11 occurred.
Its director, Michael Winterbottom, has made political statements in his earlier films. But the complexity of terrorism, or of the landscape it inhabits, seems to elude him here.
You could in some ways treat this as being a film about media too. A Pakistani man in one of the early scenes says come on, you know all American journalists here are CIA agents. Dan Futterman who plays Daniel Pearl resembles him but offers no clues about what moved him, or made his such a mighty heart. The director, drawing on the personal bits in the book, tries to bring in more than a dot of mush. Flashbacks to their wedding, then to his communing with his unborn child, their time together in Mumbai where he worked for the WSJ.
The media comes in for occasional, scathing swipes. They rush to report that his body has been found without waiting to check the veracity of the information, she does her interviews with CNN giving them lines which satisfy them. And in the final interview with an unnamed network she is asked whether she has seen the video ( of her husband¿s beheading). She retorts, "Have you no decency?" and the anchor hastily concludes the interview.
In the same interview Marianne Pearl says understands that terrorism finds its victims everywhere, and that in the month that her Danny was killed 10 Pakistanis too were killed. She says the kidnappers have failed to terrorise her---¿I am not terrorised.¿ This is about the only place in the film where she (and the film¿s director) hint at a wider perspective. But the transition from wrenching personal loss to a grieving awareness is too pat. We do not really see it evolving. Nor does it develop. Because after this we go off into recaps of their romance and life together.
How did they take a story as dramatic and unforgettable as that of Daniel Pearl, and reduce it to a story about his pretty wife?