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Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart can be an illuminating study of how a director can use his talent to project his worldview and create something subtly different from his source material, and, also how cinema today is dominated by commercial concerns and often gets beaten into flatter and sanitized versions from what was held as its potential.

Michael Winterbottom has made close to thirty films in less than 20 years of his career. His eclectic and often praiseworthy output includes literary adaptations (A Cock and Bull Story), docu-drama (The Road to Guantanamo), biopic (24-hour Party People), war film (Welcome to Sarajevo), thriller (Butterfly Kiss) , sci-fi (Code 46), Western (The Claim) and something close to pornography (9 Songs). He himself has said that his films are largely about ‘people and places’, and where he combines social realism with stylistic experiments.

A Mighty Heart is based on the book with the same title written by Marianne Pearl in memory of her husband Daniel Pearl, a journalist who was abducted and killed by fundamentalists in Pakistan. Pearl worked for the Wall Street Journal and was investigating a story in Karachi when he disappeared in early 2002. His disappearance received extensive media attention because at the time (post 9/11), Pakistan was being closely watched for its clamp down on terrorist activities. Also, what caught the world’s attention was the brutality with which Daniel Pearl was murdered and the fact that the act of his killing was recorded on a video camera. Marianne Pearl’s book is about her ordeal of searching for her husband and later coming to terms with his death.

Michael Winterbottom’s film, however, is not the story of Daniel Pearl seen through Marianne’s eyes; it is Marianne’s story seen through the director’s eyes. And in that sense, the ‘mighty heart’ is not Daniel’s (as was the intention of the book) but Marianne’s. The film opens on the day Daniel (Dan Futterman) disappears and when Marianne (Angelina Jolie) is already visibly pregnant. She is seen dealing with the agonizing situation with courage, hope, resourcefulness and sometimes, frustration and anger. Through the search period she discovers that the Pakistanis are as distrustful of Americans as the Americans are of Pakistanis. She discovers red-tapism, labyrinthine protocols, and the opaqueness of governmental functioning. She works her way through these with the help of a friend she has made in Pakistan, Asra (Archie Panjabi), Pakistani Intelligence officers, and representatives from the American consulate and Wall Street Journal. The breakthrough, however, comes when a Pakistani police officer, Captain (Irrfan Khan) gets involved with the case.

The film is structured as a thriller and shot as a docu-drama where the director tries to keep things looking as real as possible. Everything, from humdrum life to police raids, has been shot without exaggerations or flourishes (several scenes are shot in low-lit conditions that are imaginatively used to illustrate the amorphous mass of evidence during the search of Daniel Pearl, as if the hunt for Pearl is for that proverbial needle in a haystack). Nonetheless, the film’s narrative remains focused where we see the core investigating team (including Marianne and Asra) discovering new truths and newer riddles, the police following up clues with raids, politicians belching out conspiracy theories, abductors sending threatening emails and Captain and his aides race against time to find Daniel.

Winterbottom has successfully captured the mad rush of the streets of Karachi. The indistinguishable mass of people (especially to a foreign eye), the bursting-at-the-seams traffic, the congested bazaars and the ghetto-like living quarters are all taken in with documenting objectivity. The director brings out well the difficulties of investigating and the impossibility of discovering the truth in a country where the establishment both supports and bans terrorist and fundamentalist outfits, where modern, cosmopolitan cities co-exist with their terror-infested country cousins, where religion is the only identifying factor and religious zeal a means of proving one’s loyalty, where a jehadi presence in the police force doesn’t surprise and where our hero’s (Captain) zeal in getting his job done is equally matched by the “villain’s” (Omar Saeed Sheikh) ideological beliefs.

The film is more pacy and precise than the book; however, it chooses to ignore some complex elements about the book and the writer. Winterbottom avoids any definitive statement on the institutional support to militancy in Pakistan. He also ignores some aspects of Marianne’s character that come through her writing, especially her near racist remarks about both India and Pakistan and other ‘less developed’ countries. One example is the way the director presents the little girl. She is an innocent presence in the film and Marianne is seen treating her with kindness which also reminds the readers of her pregnancy. In the book, Marianne Pearl, however, says this of the maid’s daughter Kashwa, “I realize that the scary otherness of her looks comes from the way her eyes are made up. Pakistani mothers line their children’s eyes with smoky black kohl to protect them from bad spells. It makes them look like evil angels.” (emphasis mine) What the director also ignores are Marianne’s frank and lowly opinions on issues like jehad and Islamic militancy (both important and relevant to the film). One suspects that some of these edges were taken off to avoid taking any controversial standpoint and risking the business of the film. The sanitizing process results in an ‘educated, objective, balanced and forgiving’ western woman as a hero and, on the other hand, maintain a fence sitting position on larges issues of terrorism.

Winterbottom’s choice of Angelina Jolie as Marianne too seems to be motivated by commercial concerns. Jolie delivers a sincere if ordinary performance. She is not a great actor and with the body of her known works (and the famous puckered mouth), she seems fitter for Lara Croft than Marianne Pearl kind of roles. With his sincere, bespectacled journalist look, Dan Futterman fits Daniel Pearl’s character better. Irrfan Khan tries his best to lend some individuality to his role but this sincere, helpful CID officer’s character is so poorly defined that he cannot do much. Aly Khan has a two-minute role and he portrays the educated fundamentalist well. The actors who stand out, however, are Archie Panjabi as Asra and Will Patton as Randall Bennett. John Orloff’s screenplay adds to the documentary character of the film. Marcel Zyskind’s realist-and-yet-serving-the drama cinematography is excellent and explains his long association with Winterbottom. The same is true for the editor Peter Christelis who marries docu-drama and thriller elements into a single and compelling story.

A Mighty Heart is a topical and an important film but it is not the ground-breaking stuff that one expects from Michael Winterbottom. In the end, the film is neither an analysis of Pakistan’s militancy problem, nor a rigorous investigation of the nature and cause of international terrorism of which Daniel Pearl’s disappearance and murder is only a regretful result. As an adaptation, the film does not fully utilize the potential of the source book.
-Padmaja Thakore