Plot Takes Back Seat to Jolie's Star Power in A Mighty Heart

The recent blog-driven fuss kicked up by the movie A Mighty Heart -- whether casting pale-skinned Angelina Jolie as darker-skinned Afro-Cuban-Dutch Mariane Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist Danny Pearl, was an act of racist dimensions -- seems irrelevant when you consider an important piece of evidence: the movie itself. The film is not about Pearl and his journalism (as Pearle's colleague Asra Nomani has complained). And it's not about Mariane Pearl (we learn little of her past, her work, her views). It is about glamorous actor/U.N. refugee activist Jolie playing Mariane Pearl.

The real-life Pearl story was a tragedy of immense sadness. A talented journalist who sought to understand the world and convey that understanding to readers of the Wall Street Journal was abducted and murdered by al Qaeda jihadists who cared not a whit for such bridge-building. Yet the story within the movie, unfortunately, is not much of a story. After Pearl is kidnapped in Karachi in January of 2002, Jolie-as-Mariane essentially waits two weeks for the bad news. She and the Asra Nomani character try to retrace Danny's prekidnapping steps to get a lead on the abductors, but they have little success. The Mariane of the movie confronts no dramatic choices. She takes no decisive action. She does keep her composure, she worries, and she reminisces (a lot). But her actions do not drive the narrative. This is not to suggest that the real Mariane Pearl insufficiently responded to the terrible situation at hand. She did all she could. But at the center of this movie is only tragedy, not plot.

Once you understand the movie was custom-built for Jolie to display her acting chops by portraying a woman on the verge of profound loss, the casting issue becomes moot. It was designed as a star vehicle for a particular star: Jolie. There was no casting call. Sure, there's an issue with Hollywood and black actors. (When I was once working on a film project, a studio exec gently told me that a lead character should not be black because that would hurt the film's overseas marketing; the movie was never made.) But how many female Afro-Cuban-Dutch actors in Hollywood were available for the part of Mariane Pearle? And the charge that Jolie, who used makeup to darken her complexion for this role, was resorting to a modern-day version of blackface is false. White entertainers in years past donned blackface to mock and exploit a repressed group. That was not the aim of Jolie -- or that of Brad Pitt, a producer of the film, who obviously viewed the project as a showcase for his talented wife. And to her credit, Jolie poignantly depicts Mariane's anxiety, strength, and, grief.

With Jolie the main point of A Mighty Heart, the film, which was directed by Michael Winterbottom (who directed the 1997 Welcome to Sarajevo), zeroes in on one of the least interesting angles of the Pearl episode: the helpless wife who can do nothing to save her husband. Intriguing questions raised by the event go unexplored. For example, how can Western journalists engage with the other side in this clash of civilizations? The murder of Pearl stands as a constant reminder for Western journalists of the high cost of doing business in parts of the Islamic world. Consider Iraq. American journalists no longer can safely explore that war-torn nation to serve as the eyes and ears of Americans citizens. (Once, while giving a talk at a college, I asked the audience to guess how many correspondents Time magazine had deployed in Iraq. Most people estimated two dozen or so. At the time, there were three -- to cover the entire war and a country the size of California.) What happens when there are no more Danny Pearls?

Winterbottom succeeds in presenting a fast-paced movie that visually embraces the Pakistani and Indian locations where it was masterfully shot. But the film skates past another matter: the use of torture. The most interesting character in A Mighty Heart is not Mariane but Captain Javed Habib, a (fictitious) Pakistani police officer in charge of the search for Pearl. Played exquisitely by Irfan Khan, a veteran Indian actor, Habib is caught between two worlds. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. attack on the Taliban, Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf wants to show he's a reliable ally of Washington. Yet his military and intelligence service have bonds with Taliban and perhaps sympathy for al Qaeda. In one scene, the Pakistani interior ministry tells Mariane Pearl and U.S. officials that it's damn clear (at least to him) that India had orchestrated Pearl's kidnapping to embarrass Pakistan. In other words, don't expect much help from us.