Angelina Jolie Fails to Lift Tepid Film of Daniel Pearl's Widow
On a January morning in Karachi, reporter Daniel Pearl set off to do one last interview before leaving Pakistan. He was never seen again.
The story of that interview manque, and of the Wall Street Journal correspondent's 2002 abduction and decapitation, is now a motion picture, produced by Brad Pitt, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Angelina Jolie as Pearl's pregnant widow Mariane.
"A Mighty Heart'' is drawn from Mariane's delicately crafted 2003 memoir. The book toggles subtly between the kidnapping and the happy times before it. The movie is more or less a straight chronology of the days preceding Pearl's death. Subtlety is scarce, characters are two-dimensional.
"We tried to just shoot the film very simply,'' said Winterbottom at a crowded press conference during the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie was presented out of competition. Seated beside him were Jolie in a faded brown blouse, her partner Pitt in a steel-gray suit, and Mariane, their close friend.
It all started three years ago when Pitt approached Mariane about adapting the book. "I didn't think it was appropriate,'' recalled the young widow, alternating between English and her native French. "I took a year to accept to meet people from the studios.''
When she did, Pearl asked Jolie to take the role. The two had bonded after Pearl read an endearing magazine interview of the actress. "I said, please do it. You're the only one.''
Jolie recalled her extreme stress before the shoot. "For her to tell me that she felt it was done right -- I can't tell you how much that means to me,'' she said.
`One Last Interview'
In fact, Jolie's acting is merely adequate. Tanned and curly haired for the occasion, the Hollywood icon paces up and down the Karachi house with hands on hips and a knitted brow. Occasionally, she yells at the ineffectual swarm of diplomats and intelligence personnel. Her imitation of Pearl's accented English is phony and distracting.
The action gets going in no time. Opening scenes show Pearl telling his wife that he just needs "one last interview'' before they leave for Dubai the next day. There are glimpses of closeness -- Pearl kissing his wife's belly, ringing her at the grocery store -- before the bleak countdown begins.
When the reporter goes missing, his wife is shown in successive stages of disarray, making frantic calls and scouring Daniel's emails together with her friend, housemate, and fellow reporter Asra Nomani. They are visited by an assortment of officials who turn their lounge into a situation room, complete with white-board charts linking names to the kidnapping.
Body at the Morgue
For the film's first half, the viewer feels strangely detached; the directing is coarse, and the acting sub-par. At mid-film, a body is found at the morgue. Though it turns out not to be Pearl's, the heartbeat quickens, and the movie improves.
Winterbottom is most effective at the end, when a video is dropped off in a brown envelope. Incredulous Mariane is told of her husband's death; she shuts her bedroom door and howls in agony. Jolie's acting, too, gets a last-minute lift.
What baffles is that Winterbottom appears only timidly to condemn those behind the crime. Juxtaposed clips of the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay -- where terrorism suspects are held in dire conditions -- come across as attempts to explain away the hatred that caused Pearl's death.
"Guantanamo had just started at exactly the same time, and in a way, they are aspects of the same thing,'' Winterbottom said at the press conference, referring also to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. "They're both, in a way, the aftermath of 9/11, and the response to 9/11.''
Caught in the Conflict
Winterbottom recalled his previous film "The Road to Guantanamo'' (2006), which portrayed three British Muslims held in Guantanamo for two years and released without charge. "They were, in a sense, caught up in the conflict in the same way that Danny and Mariane were,'' he said.
Pitt said the important thing was "understanding the other side, viewing the other side, instead of immediately jumping to demonization or some kind of simplification, because things are complex.''
If only Winterbottom had been more adept at capturing that complexity.
News / Gossips by gandm,naz
