Pearl Before Swine

Michael Winterbottom's films can play notoriously fast and loose with linear storytelling, but A Mighty Heart turns out to be one of his more straightforward efforts — with an actual beginning, middle and end (and in that order, too). Still, even with its conventional narrative, the film about the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl can be a nerve-wracking experience.

Winterbottom (Tristram Shandy, 24 Hour Party People) hits the ground running, shooting the movie in what often feels like panic mode, hand-held cameras madly whirling in all directions (apparently agitated at the prospect of missing some minute detail) and few shots lasting longer than a couple of seconds. Shot like 24 on amphetamines and edited at a truly ruthless clip, A Mighty Heart exudes breathless urgency and unmistakable forward momentum, with a stylistic intensity that teeters between thrusting us into the action and alienating us. The movie aims for (and often achieves) the intimacy of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking, but this particular fly often appears to have some insectile variation of ADD, and it just won't stop buzzing.

The movie also bears some resemblance to David Fincher's recent Zodiac, both movies basically being police procedurals -- albeit procedurals that deliberately frustrate by appearing more interested in blind alleys than investigative (or emotional) payoffs. A Mighty Heart details the search for Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was famously kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist nutjobs back in 2002, but Pearl and his captors are barely even in the movie.

After a brief, almost cursory introduction to the character, Winterbottom shows us Pearl (Dan Futterman) hopping into a taxi (pursuing a story on radical Muslims) and then has him simply disappear. From this point, everything that happens in A Mighty Heart unfolds from the perspective of Pearl's wife, Marianne (Angelina Jolie), and other characters that find themselves equally in the dark.

It's a smart strategy. Many of us watching A Mighty Heart will be all too familiar with Daniel Pearl's story and how it ends, but by removing Pearl from active participation in his own narrative, and by shifting the focus exclusively to characters functioning more or less out of the loop (but desperately trying to find a way in), Winterbottom invites us to share their bewildered anxiety.

By refraining from actually showing us Pearl's plight, the film avoids the potential for melodrama (or having to tip-toe around the edges of exploitation), and by simply concentrating on the vast reserves of confusion at the fringes of the story, A Mighty Heart manages to make these events seem mysterious and new again.

The investigation here becomes such a tangled web, in fact, that it's nearly impossible to keep track of its shape or trajectory (Marianne's mostly futile attempts to connect the clues are diagrammed on a chalkboard that begins to resemble similarly demented chalkboards in A Beautiful Mind or The Day the Earth Stood Still).

Blind alleys and red herrings abound, but, in another smart move, Winterbottom anchors these increasingly convoluted shenanigans in the simple and highly emotional drama of a single human, Marianne, a pregnant wife desperately hoping that her husband will come home alive. The herrings are still as red and the alleys just as blind, but, seen through sympathetic eyes, the whole mess winds up seeming as poignant as it is exasperating.

The casting of Jolie -- who is surprisingly credible here, but also too big a movie star to pretend to be anything but -- allows the film to have its cake and eat it too. A Mighty Heart undoubtedly benefits from Jolie's charisma and name-above-the-title star power, but what we get here is a discreetly altered, dressed-down version of the actress that moves among the movie's other characters without seeming too terribly out of place.

Jolie pops in some brown contacts, frizzes her hair and tones down the million-megawatt smile, nailing the real-life Marianne's tricky French-Dutch-Cuban accent and doing everything she can, short of lip reduction surgery, to facilitate her character blending into the scenery.

Shot on the mean streets of Karachi and other Pakistani hot spots where the events actually took place, A Mighty Heart strives for docudrama-styled authenticity, depicting a world that is chaotic, a little spooky and nothing if not complex. Winterbottom never really sinks his teeth into any one aspect, but the filmmaker works overtime hinting at the daunting array of moral, cultural and political belief systems at play.

Islam colors everything, of course, but almost nothing is purely black or white, and some of the characters with whom we're initially encouraged to sympathize also happen to casually flirt with the Jihadist party line. It's never quite clear why Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered -- perhaps for the crime of being an American or for being Jewish or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- but that's really not the movie's concern.

The main point here seems to be that this world is a dangerous and often incomprehensible place and that Daniel Pearl's fate was merely a by-product of that environment. Winterbottom is rigorously neutral in laying out the highly charged politics implicit in Pearl's story, but that becomes both blessing and curse, as the movie's refusal to take a stand begins to feel a bit like a failure of nerve. Outside of an extended, primal howl from Jolie late in the game, there's not really much of a sense of outrage here, and while A Mighty Heart touches upon some extremely sensitive ground, it never touches down for long.

It's easy to admire the film on many levels, beginning with its simple acknowledgment of so many rarely aired complexities, but A Mighty Heart would be even easier to admire if it didn't allude to so much while defining nothing.