The day before he was scheduled to leave Karachi, the journalist was kidnapped and barbarically murdered by jihadists who videotaped his beheading.
Based on the memoir of the same name by Mariane Pearl, herself a radio journalist, A Mighty Heart is a portrait of Mariane (Angelina Jolie) seesawing between hope and hopelessness in the weeks between her husband's abduction and his death.
Jolie delivers a focused and unfussy performance, doing an honorable job imitating Mariane's inimitable Cuban-French accent. Disappearing under the curly coif resembling that of Cher circa Moonstruck, Jolie suppresses her essential Angelina-ness, completing her transition from the screen's sultry siren to its Earth Mother.
Michael Winterbottom's unsentimental film is less a profile in courage than a just-the-facts, ma'am procedural. It focuses on how Mariane, five months pregnant in a foreign country, advanced the operation to find her husband. Danny is played by Dan Futterman, Capote's screenwriter, nicely cast as the reporter and running the emotional gamut from earnest to goofy.
To experience the grief of a death, one must know something of the life, no? That's the assumption of a movie like Silkwood. It is not assumed in A Mighty Heart, which tells us precious little about Mariane and Danny - and even less about the politics behind Danny's kidnapping.
"What do Americans really know about Afghanistan and Pakistan . . . other than bombing them?" asks a friend of Mariane's as they untangle the knotted political and bureaucratic threads that might lead them to Danny.
Good question, and one that opens the door for the filmmakers to provide context absent from the film. Because Danny is Jewish, he is suspected of being an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret police. Because he is American, he is suspected of being a CIA op. That some Pakistanis hate Jews and Americans is a given, rather than a theme to be developed.
