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Brit director Michael Winterbottom is no stranger to the documentary style, with 'mockumentary' A Cock and Bull Story and actual documentary The Road to Guantanamo his last two films. It's no surprise, then, to find that his latest film also takes that route, and indeed, it seems highly appropriate for A Mighty Heart. The film recreates the recent tragic events involving the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl, and mostly follows the efforts of his wife Mariane in trying to find and rescue him. The immediate, handheld-camera docudrama approach echoes that chosen by Paul Greengrass for his 9/11 piece United 93, another film based on an event that is world famous for all the wrong reasons. Like United 93, the acting is naturalistic to the point of being invisible; these just feel like real people that we're watching in real situations. The difference in A Mighty Heart's case is that with Angelina Jolie in the lead it has a far from unknown cast.
Jolie's A-list presence could have been a hindrance to the film (and to be honest, it is sometimes distracting) but her performance is extremely strong. Her darkened skin (Mariane Pearl is half-Cuban) is subtle enough to convince and her unusual French accent is solid. Taking a role like this, Jolie might as well have "Look at me, Oscars!" stamped across her forehead but it is a far from grandstanding performance. Other than a couple of moments of raw emotion - expressed in ear-piercingly loud screams that give cinema speakers a thorough test - she's a measured and restrained woman in the film. Unsurprisingly for someone with Jolie's real-world humanitarian reputation, she spent a long time getting to know the real Mariane and that must have impacted positively on the performance. Dan Futterman is also extremely likeable as Daniel Pearl himself, for the inescapably brief duration that he is actually in the film.
The start of the film, up to the point when Daniel is kidnapped (off-screen), is very engrossing, setting up the characters extremely sympathetically, which makes our knowledge of the story's outcome all the more difficult to bear. Post-kidnap, as Mariane, with the help of the sadly powerless police services (they are trying to find basically a needle in a haystack, after all), tries to find out what happens, interest is sustained by an initially fast pace and the use of some brief flashbacks to happier times with the involuntarily separated couple. After a while, though, interest slowly dissipates, with the unavoidable outcome just making it frustrating to watch, no doubt echoing the feelings of the actual people depicted. Also, once the inevitable shocking truth is finally revealed to Mariane, the film then continues to linger for a few minutes as it winds up. By this stage it just prolongs the wait for the credits. It's difficult to criticise a film with such noble reasons for existing, but the fact is that it's just not at all cinematic. An hour-long TV documentary would probably have been a better format in which to tell this tale.
The summary
A Mighty Heart is a predictably uncomfortable watch, but it would have been wrong to be otherwise. Impressive acting offsets, to a degree, the problem of waning interest as the events unfold.
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