A Mighty Heart (2007)
Paramount DVD (Region 4)
d. Michael Winterbottom; pr. Brad Pitt, Andrew Eaton, Dede Gardner; scr. John Orloff; book. Mariane Pearl; ph. Marcel Zyskind; m. Harry Escott, Molly Nyman; ed. Peter Christelis; cast. Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi (108 mins)
In the re-definition of the cinema of terrorism that began after 9-11 with United 93 in 2003 and World Trade Center in 2006, 2007 was a watershed year. 2007 saw the release of four films – A Mighty Heart, Rendition, The Kingdom and Civic Duty. In these films, the legacy of terrorist cinema as a sub-genre became a platform onto which could be grafted ethical, rationalist and secular humanist examinations of the moral and political issues central to American Civilization as defined by the War on Terror and its figurehead, the by 2007 lame-duck President George W. Bush. It was in these three films, on the brink of the American election that would see the end of the War on Terror President, if not exactly the War on Terror itself, that the terrorist film as a subgenre was contemporized as politically relevant discourse rather than politically themed escapist entertainment. Indeed, both A Mighty Heart and Rendition brought the post 9-11 terrorist film back to one of the genre’s most influential directors, Costa-Gavras: in this case, to the political thriller Missing.
In A Mighty Heart, director Michael Winterbottom brings a documentarist’s nervous immediacy and a journalist’s authenticity to scenes of Pakistani society reacting to the idealism, romanticism and lack thereof of the American media, here represented by Daniel Pearl. As the narrative centers on Pearl’s pregnant wife, Angelina Jolie, the political perspective here is seen through a humanist’s lens. Indeed, this humanism also infiltrates (with varying degrees of irony) the other terrorist films of 2007. Of these, A Mighty Heart is the sole true story and as such has perhaps the heaviest responsibility. But: although it explores the ethical issues that have arisen since the declaration of the War on Terror, it is reticent about depicting the terrorists themselves except through fragmentary physical details glimpsed initially in photographs of Pearl held at gunpoint. The terrorist figure, so prominent pre 9-11, is here oblique: an implied “other” so dangerously unknown as to cast doubt on all even remotely connected – themes also informing Rendition and Civic Duty.
Daniel Pearl features only briefly as a character in A Mighty Heart. The film concentrates after the initial abduction on Jolie. Appropriately enough, one of the two central female roles in Rendition was also a pregnant wife hoping to find her husband, though in Rendition the husband is a terrorist suspect rather than terrorist victim. Much of the film is similar to a police procedural in which Jolie follows the trail to try and find her husband before the threat of his execution is carried out. However, the cultural, political and religious subjects it evokes as surrounding the procedural make for a telling depiction of the issues underlying the War on Terrorism. For instance: Islamic anti-Semitism is chosen by Winterbottom as an ironic context in which to reveal Pearl’s Jewish background. In an interview with an Islamic cleric, who believes that 9-11 is a Jewish conspiracy carried out by Mossad, Pearl rather naively states he’s Jewish. It is immediately after this revelation that Daniel Pearl disappears. The first question asked of Jolie as she relates his disappearance is “does anyone know he’s Jewish?”
Just as the religious hatred underlying the terrorism that robbed Daniel pearl of his right to self-determination is slyly evoked, so too is the humanity of terrorist treatment – the crisis of detention as represented by Guantanamo Bay. Jolie watches news of Guantanamo Bay detainees as she contemplates her husband’s fate at the hands of the men being treated as such. When the terrorists post pictures, they say Pearl is treated just like the Americans treat their prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and that if the Americans treat theirs better, so Pearl’s conditions will improve. That said, they are quite ready to execute Pearl and film it for internet broadcast. It no longer matters who began what, as what A Mighty Heart implies is the moral relativism of a humanity trapped in a cycle of tit-for-tat exchange between terrorists and the Americans, a theme also found in yet another 2007 movie Vantage Point, which restored to the terrorist film the thrilling action of top drawer visceral political thrillers from early Frankenheimer to late Tony Scott. The treatment of suspected terrorist detainees would be explicitly treated in Rendition’s water-boarding scenes and the forced interrogation of an innocent scenario underlies both Rendition and Civic Duty.
A Mighty Heart, Rendition and Civic Duty all introduce a new set-piece into the dramatic structure of the terrorist movie – the torture scene. In this new trope of the genre, a terrorist suspect is interrogated and tortured in order to extract information that may be of use to the interrogating authority. The torture scene functions as an ethical discourse on a civilization that in the rhetoric of the War on Terror justifies the effective violation of an individual’s human rights in order to potentially protect a greater number from the terrorist intention to rob them of their right to self-determination. Self-determination is the dominant discourse underlying the cinema of terrorism as a subgenre, but it is only after 9-11 that the subgenre developed a set-piece with such headline-making relevance to American morality: hence, terrorist cinema post 9-11 sees the torture scene as a structuring trope which encapsulates the ethical dilemmas posed to secular humanism by the War on Terror.
A Mighty Heart is concerned with the frustrations of the attempt to find Daniel Pearl. It evokes the monstrous compromises to humanity in the War on Terror as background for a procedural story of frustrated crisis management. In that it reverses the proficiency of crisis management that made American legends out of the rebellious passengers in United 93. Here, American crisis management is ineffective and there is a sad defeatism saturating A Mighty Heart, a resignation to the facts of living in a War on Terror world. Of the 2007 terrorist film batch, it is aesthetically the closest to docudrama and is informed by a journalistic immediacy familiar from news agencies such as CNN. Indeed, on the DVD release of A Mighty Heart is an introduction by CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour in which she contextualizes the film in terms of the risks faced by journalists and the persecution of journalists in some parts of the world. However, this freedom-of-the-press argument does not greatly inform the movie, as Winterbottom’s staging of the scene in which Pearl reveals his Jewish background suggests it’s religious resentment rather than specific resentment of American journalism that underscores the terrorist motivation in targeting Pearl.
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