I am not one to watch a movie that dispenses modilin emotions to sell people on buying a ticket and watching it. I am also skeptical about movies that center around current events and reality since 2001. However, this movie attracted me to want to see it.
I read this book about a year ago off of a suggestion by a good friend of mine. It was written by Mariane Pearl, the wife of slain Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl. I read each page and felt two things in the end. She had an incredible love for this man, both in life and in death and she wrote this book to let people know who Daniel Pearl was outside of the info given by fox news and such. He was more than a man of Jewish faith and more than a journalist. He was a husband and a soon to be father.
We are given direct access into her world. We sit at the dinner table with her friends in Pakistan. They revel in happiness and delight while she looks burdened and worried. Worried that her husband, chasing a story about Muslim extremists coming to Pakistan to continue their war on the world, is not at home for dinner. Soon we live her pain, her horror as this political thriller just goes all the wrong directions and he is kidnapped by these evil men.
We see all the back door politics and meetings trying to assure his safe return. We are given small and very intense moment that rivet us to the action on the screen. We see her fall apart when a body is discovered, only to be shown it is not Daniel.
Soon we find out that Danny didn't make it. We see her just fall apart. We just fall apart with her. We want answers, just like she does.
Angelina Jolie is Mariane Pearl. I have seen Mariane in interviews and press kits for her books. Everything that Mariane is Angelina. You don't see the gorgeous women of " Brangelina". We see Mariane. The rest of the cast is quiet but powerful.
This quasi-documentery remind me of another powerful film of the same elk. United 93 stuck with realism and the same docu style of filmmaking to give us the morbid experience of reliving the events. As with United 93, we are the fly on the wall.
Winterbottom crafts a fantastic voyage that plays on the theme of love and loss than just current emotion. With snipets of their love affair and their courtship, we fall in love with them as much as they fall in love with themselves. You will need a mighty heart to view A Mighty Heart.