Some films are such powerful stories before they get to film that you
adjust yourself to it once the mood and tempo of the film is set. A
Mighty Heart is a mighty story in itself, you know that before you walk
in. What you want to know is how the movie is going to tell it.
Michael
Winterbottom is reputed as an intelligent, sensitive filmmaker - this
from reading about him and his films. He brings both aspects in full
glory to the reel with this film.
By design or default, and in
retrospective it seems just right that the film started without much
ado. I mean that literally, we sat down after the National Anthem, and
the credits rolled, just like that. No ads, no stereophonic sound
design for the title shot of the production house, nothing. As if
Winterbottom had that planned and said, ’let’s get on with it.’
The
film opens on a day, just a day, like the one that had passed for Pearl
and his wife and the one that would have followed, if not for his
kidnapping.
Daniel Pearl was a WSJ reporter, working on a story
for which a contact through a chain of contacts has setup a meeting for
him with a particular Sheik Gilani. Later turns out that the chain of
contacts and fixers include some shady characters. However, this is not
Danny’s story, it is Mariane’s - his French wife, a journalist and an
expecting mother.
This isn’t a plot based story, the plot is
irrelevant and far too complicated for it to have become a picture as
powerful as A Mighty Heart is. This is the story of a human tragedy,
Danny and Marine’s at an individual level, and of a confused, bitter
society of extremists, who live in a state of suspended human values,
reason or sanity.
The film, for its most part is set in the
front section of the house of Hasra Numani played (rather, beautifully
underplayed) by Archie Punjabi. Hasra is an Indian by origin, works
with Danny at the WSJ, and is on the story with him. The other
characters include some known faces in Will Patton who plays an
American consulate agent in charge of diplomatic security, Irrfan plays
Captain Javed Habib, head of the Pakistan CID and Aly Khan plays a
jihadi who plans and executes one part of Pearl’s kidnapping.
Other
characters include Danny’s parents and sister back home, Danny’s friend
and colleague called Steve, Danny’s boss at WSJ and Javed Habib’s rock
steady right hand man. These characters inhabit Hasra’s house for the 5
weeks of the search and most of the screen time. It’s pointless in
talking about individual performances, they are perfect in the context
of the film, and more perfect than that is Angelina Jolie’s performance
as Danny’s wife. At no point in the film, including the scene when she
finds out about Danny’s death does the performance get emotionally
overbearing. Angelina lives Mariane and lives her as if she WAS her. At
the end of the film, during a sombre going-away dinner that she owes to
these people who put their lives into saving her husband’s she says,
’the motive of terrorists is to terrorize people, and your efforts are
not in vain because I don’t feel terrorized. I cannot thank you enough
for what you have done for me.’ She says without a tear in her eye, she
holds herself in the same disposition through the film when anyone
except her occupies the frame - it is the undying love for her husband,
her stubborn hope of seeing him again, and in the end, the new lease of
life in their child that she finds her courage and her reason for life.
Danny never gave in, and neither will she.
The film is just about that, about her story, her version of what these people went through in those 5 weeks.
However,
from a pure ’film’ perspective, there is so much more that Winterbottom
has incorporated into his film. If it wasn’t for this enormous human
tragedy that one genuinely experiences, the film would work just as
well as a political drama, as the story of a victim trapped in an
indecipherable system where each player has his stake to protect, yet a
duty to fulfill. On another level, it’s a great character film. It’s a
fantastic script, which straddles between the tragedy on a larger
level, to weaving in elements of unintended humor and the beauty of
everyday-ness into the lives of those around Mariane.
At some
moments in it, I was reminded of Syriana, where each character only
holds a small perspective within a perspective so large that at some
level it doesn’t make sense at all, but somehow in pieces it does.
Similarly, in A Mighty Heart, in the huge scheme of things, Danny was
one piece of perspective that these characters held, while various
other players i.e the Media, the US Government, the Pakistani
government, the Jihadist organisations, held other pieces which
resulted in Danny becoming a price that his family had to pay.
Danny’s
story is allegorical to the truth that surrounds us, the reality of the
insanity that our world is. It is heartbreaking in itself, yet in
Mariane’s version of it, she pitches in the positive side of humanism -
through courage, will and hope.