[Frederica-l] NRO: A Mighty Heart

[Frederica at aol.com]

Here's my review of "A Mighty Heart," appearing today on National Review 
Online. I admire or respect the film, but it was more grueling than interesting. 
HOpe I have corrected the formatting errors some of you reported.
 
the link to this on my website:
 
_http://www.frederica.com/writings/a-mighty-heart.html_ 
(http://www.frederica.com/writings/a-mighty-heart.html) 
 
BTW, for those interested in contemporary music, today's podcast is a 
conversation I had with my son Stephen the day he and his wife Jocelyn (now 3 mos 
pregnant) returned from the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee. They've gone 
every year, starting with their honeymoon in 2004. For someone as committed to 
Christ and as morally conservative as Stephen, attendance at this hippie fest 
is a strange mix--but he loves the music, which this year stretched from 
Gillian Welch to Ralph Stanely to Ornette Coleman to the Police to Tool. And don't 
forget good ol' Fountains of Wayne. 
 
Here's the page for my podcast; you can click and listen on any of them, or 
subscribe to get them every Friday. 
 
_http://ancientfaithradio.com/podcasts/frederica_ 
(http://ancientfaithradio.com/podcasts/frederica) 
 
Also, my buddy Rod Dreher, who writes the extremely popular "Crunchy Con" 
blog on Beliefnet.com, posted a bit this past Wednesday noting that it was the 
33rd anniversary of my "Damascus Road" conversion to Christ. A lively discussion 
continues about the nature of spiritual experiences, and why some people seem 
more disposed to have them than others. You can join in at:
 
_http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/06/that-still-small-voice.html_ 
(http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/06/that-still-small-voice.html) 
 
and PS -- I went to a screening of Pixar's newest animated feature, 
"Ratatouille," last night, and I loved it! The review will be published next Friday. 
 
 
 
*** 
On January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped 
on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan. Some weeks later a horrifying videotape 
arrived, documenting that he had been beheaded. In those intervening days, his 
wife Mariane and a team of friends and investigators tried desperately to find 
him, adding up the scarce clues that might enable them to save his life. It 
was nightmarish in a way we can hardly imagine. "A Mighty Heart" gives us a 
100-minute tour of that nightmare.  
The flaw in this expertly-made movie is that that's *all* it gives us. But 
first, give director Michael Winterbottom his due: he has effectively used every 
means at his disposal to keep the audience just as tense and frustrated as 
the characters. (It's a challenging task because, after all, we already know how 
the story turns out). The images he shows us appear in exaggerated contrast, 
so that things we're trying to look at are concealed by shadows or lost in 
whitish glare. Interior scenes have an unpleasant fluorescent hue, and the colors 
look as exhausted as the characters. Often enough, we're being awoken in the 
gray dawn, or sitting with the characters through endless eye-glazing hours 
tapping at laptop computers. The collision of urgency with hopelessness is a 
particularly miserable feeling, and Winterbottom makes sure we feel it keenly. 
The city of Karachi itself contributes a chaotic factor to the story, posing 
impediments to any attempt to go anywhere or do anything. It is impossibly 
congested; as Brendan Bernhard described it in the New York Sun, Karachi is "a 
heavily-guarded city in southern Pakistan with a population of 14 million 
people, all of whom appear to be male." http://www.nysun.com/article/41200?page_no=2 
The task of locating one man in this melee appears hopeless. As if that 
wasn't enough, Winterbottom throws in additional small bits designed to make us 
feel even more jittery. As we gaze through a car windshield at heedless 
pedestrians blocking our way, one stumbles and just misses falling under the car's 
wheels. Little extra twitches like that, extraneous to the plot, pile the tension 
higher.  
And the sound track is a perfect match, keeping us on edge continually with 
scrapes and screeches, rustlings and whines, a muezzin's call, a baby's cries, 
strange-sounding pop music blaring from tinny speakers. Cellphone ringtones 
from five years ago are drearily familiar. Two recent movies that impressed me 
with their sound design were "Punchdrunk Love" and "Lost in Translation;" "A 
Mighty Heart" makes three.  
Yet for all this tension there isn't really *suspense*, in terms of a story 
you can follow step by step. It's just too complicated for a non-expert to be 
able to do that, given that this is a movie flying past rather than a book or 
news article. We're given permission to relax on that point when, early on, we 
see Mariane (played by Angelina Jolie) take a large whiteboard and begin to 
diagram on it the names and connections of possible players. Every time that 
board reappears the diagram is more complicated and tangled with names, but 
apparently we're meant simply to grasp that fact, rather than scrutinize and 
memorize. Catching all this data on the fly would be impossible, if only because of 
the confusion of names. A significant figure in Pearl's kidnapping, for 
example, is Amed Omar Saeed Sheikh; he is also known as Omar Sheikh, Sheikh Omar, 
Sheikh Syed, as well as aliases "Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad" and "Bashir." 
Characters toss around the names of other characters in a variety of accents and 
against a noisy background, so it's no wonder that some points go flowing by. We end 
up staying on edge throughout the film, but without a sense of the story 
proceeding or developing.  
The film's focus on Mariane is also limiting. The more tantalizing story 
would be the one about Pearl (excellently played by Dan Futterman), and we get 
hints of his character when, for example, he is seen in a kidnapper's photo 
retaining a bold smile, despite the gun pointed at his head. In re-enactments of 
the terrorists' video Pearl is calm and quietly steadfast about his Jewish 
background, and even cites more proof of his heritage than his captors demand. The 
perhaps inevitable decision to tell the story from Mariane's point of view, 
given that the film is based on Mariane's book, means that it centers on a 
person who is going through something rather than one who is actively doing 
something.  And there is something about Angelina Jolie that is intrinsically cold. 
The trait leaks from the actress to the character, so that we feel little 
emotional connection between Mariane and her friends and supporters. Maybe Angelina 
Jolie has become too much of a celebrity to pass as an actress anymore; even 
though her appearance and actions are subdued, compared to some other roles 
she's played, the tabloid identity still tramples the character's bounds. 
Despite earlier hints that the film might treat terrorists sympathetically 
(Brad Pitt, Jolie's partner and one of the film's producers, said he hoped it 
would "increase understanding" and tell the story "without anger or judgment"), 
"A Mighty Heart" reports events coolly, without provoking either tenderness or 
vengeful fury toward Pearl's captors.  It begins with the assumption that 
these horrible things are happening, and doesn't justify or explain. The closest 
it comes to politicizing is when a newsclip depicts Colin Powell responding to 
the kidnappers' demand that Guantanamo prisoners be released with the 
statement that they "are being treated humanely." But this point is not belabored, 
and it's clearly outnumbered by scenes depicting the cruelty and anti-Semitism 
of the terrorists. (They are forthrightly called "terrorists," not fudge-terms 
like "militants.") "A Mighty Heart" is an effective memoir of what it's like 
to endure several weeks of that terror; but without emotionally grounded 
characters or a developing plot, it amounts to a still life-a peculiarly abrasive 
and miserable one.
 
********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com



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