Movie Review

A Mighty Heart

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 10, 2007

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

I’ve heard a few critics complain that A Mighty Heart comes up on the short end of trying to be a thriller. As I watched it, however, never once did I get the feeling that it was trying to be a thriller. No, failing to be a thriller isn’t the film’s major problem. Like this year’s Zodiac, A Mighty Heart never gets away from being what it is: a docudrama, and a very well-done one at that. But A Mighty Heart could have been a great docudrama; it’s just lacking the single most important trait needed to create a great film: character development. When comparing the two films, Zodiac has a good degree of character development, while A Mighty Heart overlooks it by focusing on other things.

A Mighty Heart is a post-9/11-inspired movie that deals with a great subject: the beheading of Wall Street Journal writer Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman). After 9/11, Danny and his wife, Mariane (Angelina Jolie), move to Pakistan to cover events in the Middle East. Mariane herself is a journalist, working for French Public Radio. After two months, the couple is ready to leave Pakistan but Danny wants to do one last interview with a known terrorist. Although he takes as many precautions as he can, Danny is kidnapped. From there the film follows the investigation in trying to get Danny back. The investigation is headed by a Captain from the Pakistani Government (Irfan Khan), American agent Randall Bennet (Will Patton) and some journalist friends of Danny’s.

Unlike Zodiac, this film has a quick pace and I was very absorbed by the rough cinematography, which is rumored to be shot with a hand-held camera. The film does a pretty nice job taking us through the investigation piece by piece, clue by clue. It’s closer to a documentary than it is a thriller. I kind of felt like it was somewhere in between (hence the term docudrama) and given the film’s director, Michael Winterbottom, that is no surprise. Winterbottom did 2006’s The Road to Guantanamo, which is a film you could argue that it is a documentary, or a narrative.

The film’s only flaw is its lack of character development. It was easy for Zodiac to balance it’s character detail with it’s docudrama investigation because of its 160-minute running time. A Mighty Heart, with a running time of 108 minutes, spends so much effort focusing on the flow of the story and the investigation of Danny, it forgets about it’s characters, and all of them are like one-dimensional robots.

Angelina Jolie is getting some early Oscar buzz for her performance as Mariane, but I guarantee you she does not dominate the picture. In fact, there’s a good 15-20 minutes in which her character is totally absent. A lot of people like this quality about the picture, but I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s emotional and powerful acting by Jolie, but I didn’t feel like I knew her. Her performance needed to be the face of this movie but it’s not quite because she not in it enough. Consequently, it’s harder to identify emotionally with Jolie’s character in the dramatic scene at the end in which she finds out that her husband was killed (a scene that also seems very “over the top”).

The same goes for Danny. The film is supposed to be dedicated to him but instead it’s dedicated to the investigation to find Danny. At the end of the film, Mariane asserts that Danny was an ordinary hero, but we didn’t know him well enough to really agree with that. Danny is only in the film at the beginning and in a few flashbacks but that is it. Really, it seems like the guy just got himself into trouble by barking up the wrong tree. We know he was a good and innocent guy but based on what the film gives us it’s a little bit of a stretch to call him a hero. No, not a hero, more like a tragic casualty.

So there it is, that’s the problem. One little textbook necessary to create a great movie was overlooked because the film became caught up in other things. I walked out of A Mighty Heart entertained but overwhelmed with that annoying feeling of what could have been.