Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

A Mighty Heart

(R; 100 minutes)

In 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was in Karachi, Pakistan. He and his pregnant wife Mariane were about to leave for a safer locale when he was duped into thinking he could get an interview with a high-ranking radical cleric. Instead, the man was kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered — beheaded by terrorists while a video camera captured the atrocity.

That much is well known, and “A Mighty Heart” doesn’t dare try to change that tragic ending to the story of Danny and Mariane.

Instead, this documentary-style drama shows us the sad tale from Mariane’s viewpoint. Director Michael Winterbottom uses authentic locations (he filmed in Pakistan and India among other places) and hand-held cameras to take us into the heart of the heartbreak. Starting on the day Danny (as his wife called him) left for his fatal rendezvous and ending with the agonizing news of his murder, “A Mighty Heart” tells us how events unfolded for Mariane as she watched Pakistani cops (who don’t have to mess with any Bill of Rights technicalities), local politicians (who were more than eager to blame India for the mess) and American investigators race to find Pearlman alive.

Because we know they failed, the suspense factor comes in small bits: tracing cell phones, tracking witnesses, bullying informants.

At the center is Mariane, for two reasons: She wrote the book on which the film is based, and she is portrayed by Angelina Jolie, a star who is nearly as talented as she is famous. In a film filled with natural-looking performers — you could easily believe that most of them aren’t actors — Jolie stands out awkwardly. It’s not that she can’t play the part, it’s that we never forget who we’re watching.

Here’s the paradox. It takes a star of Jolie’s magnitude — and a producer who’s equally powerful, some guy named Pitt — to get a downbeat piece like this made and distributed. But the drama would have been more devastating if an unknown had played the role.

“A Mighty Heart” is not for the sensitive or squeamish, but it does provide some insight into the dangers of working as a foreign correspondent in a lawless land.

We give it a B-

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