A Mighty Heart is a solid movie about Mariane Pearl’s search for her husband, murdered WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. It’s well worth watching, but it’s too narrow in scope to satisfy. The full story is crying out to be unraveled: Pakistan’s Great Game, Al Qaeda’s backstory, the ISI links; less Oprah, more Syriana.

In real life

Instead the movie covers five uncomprehending weeks at Mariane Pearl’s table while poor Daniel had long since been quartered and buried. Angelina Jolie is prettier than Dan Futterman, but her character was peripheral to the larger tale. Even if doing a human drama, focusing on Daniel would have been more compelling.

Like most real-life detective stories, A Mighty Heart is frustrating to follow. There’s little suspense since you already know what happens in the end. Instead, you share in all the dead ends during the search, Mariane Pearl living Lost in Translation with higher stakes.

Director Michael Winterbottom films handheld, documentary-style and fast, a matte Michael Mann. This film is a far sight better than mainstream movies, but not quite as good as Black Friday, which dissects Bombay’s ‘93 blasts.

Panjabi has had a string of classy movies including The Constant Gardener and A Good Year. No longer a British diplomat or an arch assistant, here she plays earnest SAJAista Asra Nomani with bad Hindi. George Khan’s daughter is all grown up. I think I’m in love.

The subtitles euphemize ‘behenchod‘ as ‘bastard.’ A Hindi email address, ‘nobadmashi@…,’ is explained. We’re knee-deep in IP addresses, email headers and cell tower triangulation. As head of the CID, Irrfan Khan chews scenery and slaps people around. But Khan’s stilted, Walken-like delivery is a trademark, not adapted to the role. Kay Kay Menon got better interrogation and torture scenes in Friday, but kudos to Winterbottom for not whitewashing police brutality.

A Pakistani official grills Nomani for being of Indian origin and blames the kidnapping on India. Musharraf later changed the official line and absurdly blamed Britain:

In his book In the Line of Fire, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf claims that Daniel Pearl’s murderer was an agent of MI6 (British Intelligence), who at some point became a double agent. [Link]

Like Shattered Glass, the movie is an implicit bit of media criticism. It shows WSJ managers struggling to help without coming across like an arm of the U.S. government. Mariane Pearl, herself a journalist, is chum in the water for the Pakistani media. Although print is more respectful than TV, it’s poetic justice.

The movie is shot close in, presumably to avoid continuity errors (it was largely shot in Pune), and to convey the pregnant wife’s sense of claustrophobia. But the visuals are misleading, shot in such extreme closeup that you only see fleeting bits of traffic, garbage dumps and poverty. Westerns watching this film will get little sense of either Pakistan or Pune. It’s like showing someone inner-city Detroit as their only glimpse of America.

Despite criticism about Jolie’s casting, she busts out her acting chops, doing a difficult accent in a strap-on pregnancy belly while underplaying the material:

Some black actors, including British actress Thandie Newton (Crash), were shocked that Jolie would play Pearl, a woman of Afro-Cuban and Dutch descent. Some blogs went so far as to call it “the new blackface…”

“I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. [Mariane] Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” [Link]

Jolie was surprised by Bombay slums:

In this city of 18 million–almost double the population of Los Angeles–a reported 43 percent live in shantytowns and slums. Women plead for rupees on every block near the hotels. At stoplights, boys bang on taxi windows, selling trinkets or begging for rice. “I’ve never been around such extreme wealth next to such extreme poverty, and so much of it,” she says. “It’s hard to understand how it has gotten so bad.” As we wait in traffic, a boy knocks on the window… “Did you see what book he was selling? … The World Is Flat.” [Link]

Newsweek recaps the filming non-troversy at a Muslim school:Bin Laden was fondly nurtured by the CIA

… local newspapers claimed that the white British guards had shoved parents and kids and called them “bloody Indians” and “bloody Muslims…” Jolie had gone from being the most famous star in India to its most famous racist…

[Brad] Pitt [was] interviewed by [Barkha Dutt]… and–voilà!–the following day, Jolie’s men [were] released from jail. [Link]

Here’s what I wanted to hear more about: ISI chief Mahmood Ahmed had Omar Sheikh wire $100K to Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. When this inconvenient truth came out, the ISI chief was forced to resign. The movie glosses over this 9/11 connection; blink and you’ll miss it:

It is a fact that Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, then head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta before 9/11 through an intermediary. (This was reported in the Journal on Oct. 10, 2001.)… [Link]

The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen. Mahmood. [Link]

Sheikh was later convicted for involvement in the Daniel Pearl kidnapping:

After his surrender on February 5, the ISI debriefed Sheikh in secret for an entire week before passing him over to the Pakistani police on February 12. This not only implies that his case was at first being handled by officials at the highest level of Pakistani intelligence; it also shows how little interest the ISI had in helping the police solve the crime. When he surrendered, Pearl had probably only just been murdered. If the ISI had moved quickly to turn him over to the police, rather than engage in what appear to have been delaying tactics, it might still have been possible to apprehend the entire jihadi network responsible for his death. [Link]

This is a larger story worth telling:The selective deployment of violent Islamists lies at the heart of Pakistani policy

“[Osama bin Laden] was fondly nurtured by the CIA: they admired him. A prince who gave up luxury and lived in caves and hovels for a noble cause. I used to hear all about him from all the CIA people here–operators, officers. They were always inviting him to garden parties at the embassy…”

Daniel Pearl seems to have been kidnapped by a man with strong links to Pakistani intelligence, who was also working closely with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the most senior figures in the central command of al-Qaeda… the selective deployment of violent Islamists still lies at the very heart of Pakistani policy…

The different jihadi groups have now outgrown and outmaneuvered all their various creators, and have succeeded in bringing havoc not just to Indian Kashmir but also to the Pakistan that gave them birth… [Link]

Check out the trailer:

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