A Mighty Heart
|
|
Restrained and impressive: Angelina Jolie as Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart.
|
This is the story of the 2002 abduction in Karachi of the Wall Street Journal writer, Daniel Pearl, and the efforts of his pregnant wife Marianne, his colleagues, the Pakistani police, the security services, and the CIA and the FBI to get him back alive.
Although most viewers will already know the awful upshot of events, Winterbottom’s intimate focus on Marianne’s and the investigators’ reactions to events, on their hopes and anxieties, carries you along. This is personal, tense and dramatic, and a restrained Angelina Jolie as Marianne, and Irrfan Khan as the police chief are impressive. We’re still gripped, even after Daniel’s death, by the procedural detail of tracing his killers through phone and email records. The film, though, raises a much bigger issue – why did this happen? And it falls some way short of an answer.
Marianne Pearl, from whose book the film is adapted, is a French public radio journalist. Her role, she tells us, is to overcome division by making people better informed of others’ circumstances. Yet although we get the immediate ‘security’ context – the politics dividing the Pakistanis and the tunnel-vision spookiness of the Americans – there’s little beyond that. Marianne, a Buddhist, resorts to chanting to overcome ‘hate’.
It’s gut-wrenching, and suggests that the spirit and emotions exist independently of the reality of people’s lives. Pakistan’s appalling poverty and its political and economic stasis don’t get a look in. And, weirdly, no-one ever mentions US foreign policy.
- Product information
- directed by Michael Winterbottom
- Star rating
Join over 10,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, issue alerts, contests, and more!
Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
New Internationalist (NI) workers' co-operative exists to report on issues of world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice.
Except where otherwise noted, images on this site are copyright of the photographer/illustrator or representative agency.Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
