A Mighty Heart

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“How do you find one man amongst all this?” Angelina Jolie asks us as she adopts the guise of Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl. She is referring - at least on the surface of matters - to the anonymity of being lost in the bustling streets of Karachi, Pakistan, where her husband was abducted while in the midst of mining the details behind 2001’s infamous shoe bombing attempt by Londoner Richard Reid.

However, her question comes to resonate more deeply as events unfold, or rather, are hampered by a stupefying matrix of disinformation and propaganda from western and Middle Eastern quarters. In the midst of the smoke and mirrors, a sense of humanity shines through, in the form of various figures from the American and Pakistani authorities who are portrayed as a group resolute in their common goal to save a man’s life and his young family’s future. Jolie and Dan Futterman (the Academy Award nominated screenwriter behind Capote) ably promote this compassion for the couple by turning in nuanced and believable performances.

Left to the characteristically respectful approach of director Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo), the myriad of delicate matters encompassed by the story are spared a straight-to-cable fate as he serves a treatment that is mostly concerned with a chain of terrible revelations as opposed to any sensationalist angle on the physical act of Pearl’s brutal murder or the Guantanamo Bay scandal of the time. A Mighty Heart leaves such schmaltz to a less sophisticated film and stands up as a compelling document.