Although A Mighty Heart, a fictional recreation of the search for the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, centers around the character of Pearl's wife (persuasively evoked with a very convincing French accent by Angela Jolie), the real stars are the Pakistanis who dominate the screen and get almost all the action scenes, while Jolie mostly sits at home looking very worried, pregnant and beautiful. Mighty Heart portrays a wide tapestry of Pakistani policemen, jihadis and civilians, all of whom are presented just as three dimensionally as the Westerners around whom the film and, to a certain extent, the world, necessarily revolves. A particular kudos should go to the filmmakers for their even handed portrayal of what are normally the least sympathetic of characters, the officers of the Pakistani secret police, who are shown using a wide range of tactics from quiet persuasion to outright torture to energetically and relentlessly investigate the Pearl kidnapping. In short, Michael Winterbottom et al have taken what could have easily been a vehicle for the crudest sort of Muslim bashing and produced instead a fair and yet unblinking view of the best and worst of Pakistani life and culture.
Review of A Mighty Heart
