As readers of last week’s Mail & Guardian were informed, Michael Winterbottom is an amazingly productive director. He’s a British independent who makes quick, relatively cheap films that do not, however, look quick and cheap — except in their narrative fluidity, naturalism and lack of reliance on the big set-pieces of Hollywood.
Winterbottom’s films cover a wide range of styles and subjects. There’s 24-Hour Party People, about the Joy Division years of the Mancunian music industry; there’s the explicit sex/relationship movie Nine Songs; there’s a western, The Claim (adapted from Thomas Hardy), and the post-modern rejig of the 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story. His documentary The Road to Gauntánamo engages with the ‘war on terror”, and so does his new film, A Mighty Heart. This is a fictionalisation of Mariane Pearl’s memoir of what happened when her husband, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped by jihadists in Pakistan in 2002, then beheaded and his body mutilated. That stirring victory for the courageous forces of Islamic theocracy was recorded on video and released to the world under the title The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.
How the relevant jihadists imagined this would further their cause is baffling. Almost as baffling as their assumption that a Jew working in Pakistan must be a Mossad agent. (Their belief that he was a CIA agent was a tiny bit more substantiated, in that Pearl’s paper, The Wall Street Journal, had earlier admitted giving information to that agency. But still …) Intentionally or not, the film generates a sickened despair at the thought of this kind of violent fundamentalism and its ridiculous assumptions about the world. It feels like a case of classic paranoia: the delusions of grandeur alongside the delusions of persecution. But of course the persecution is real, in that such jihadists have set themselves up as religious revolutionaries, and few rulers (democratic or autocratic) like to contemplate the prospect of their own demise or loss of power. Without the persecution, jihadists would doubtless feel quite useless, and they’d have fewer grounds for their delusions of grandeur.
We know what happened to Daniel Pearl, so A Mighty Heart is not going to contain that kind of suspense. Instead, it revolves around Mariane at the time of the kidnapping (she was seven months pregnant), and the story is her terrifying emotional journey. She is the cynosure of the film, and without a strong central performance it would not have worked. Angelina Jolie delivers the goods here; after a few minutes one in fact forgets that this is Angelina Jolie the superstar, with all her kink-o-rama and babies of many colours and big-star hubby (who in fact co-produced this film). She is entirely absorbed into the role.
The overall verisimilitude of the film helps to accomplish that, too. It does not shy from the complexities of the situation — the use of torture by the Pakistani police, for instance, or the weird outgrowths of anti-India sentiment. Working from a script by John Orloff, Winterbottom and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind shoot the film like a documentary, and the camera is as unsettled as the characters. A Mighty Heart is the opposite of glossy, and the result is both a sense of a real place and time and a feeling of extreme intimacy in the portrayal of Mariane Pearl. The ultimate effect is an emotional impact most movies don’t even try to achieve.