A mournful sense of inevitability pervades A Mighty Heart, in which Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan while his wife and a team of colleagues and investigators frantically tried to find him. The movie, an adaptation of Mariane Pearl's memoir and directed by Michael Winterbottom, brings those dreadful weeks back with brutally vivid detail as a taut, meticulously crafted police procedural. Part thriller, part melodrama, A Mighty Heart recalls last year's United 93 -- in its technical prowess and artistry but also in its harrowing emotional arc, one that clearly aims to inspire viewers, though it may just as likely leave them feeling utterly wrung out.
Welcome to the new Cinema of Compulsive Reenactment, wherein excruciatingly painful recent events are rushed to the screen with breathless, almost fetishistic detail, and whose precise aims are subject to interpretation. Is this instant mythologizing a form of catharsis? Closure?
Rank exploitation? Or a particularly American, impatient brand of revisionism, designed to create an immediately usable past? In "A Mighty Heart," Angelina Jolie is transformed and transforming as the woman whose journalist husband was murdered by terrorists in 2002.
A mournful sense of inevitability pervades A Mighty Heart, in which Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan while his wife and a team of colleagues and investigators frantically tried to find him.
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