On January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (played by Dan Futterman) and his journalist wife Mariane (played by Angelina Jolie) arrive in Karachi, Pakistan. Although scores of reporters descended on Pakistan to cover the war in Afghanistan, by early 2002 most had left the country. Pearl, however, stays because someone whom he interviewed in Islamabad has offered to set up an interview with Sheik Gilani (played by Ikram Bhatti) in Karachi. As the film unfolds, filmviewers see a chaotic city teeming with people and motor traffic. Pearl, as planned, goes to a restaurant to meet the Sheik, but he finds no such person there. Then mysteriously he boards a taxicab and is not seen alive again. Pregnant Mariane, who remains in almost constant touch with her husband, discovers to her horror that his cellphone is not answering and that he is missing from their residence that night. The next morning, she calls the American embassy, which mobilizes upon the Pakistan police to begin an investigation, though the Interior Minister is coldly indifferent. Soon, the FBI and Pearl’s Wall Street Journal boss arrive in Karachi to assist. After five weeks, a videotape of his beheading arrives. Mariane returns to Paris and writes the book on which the film is based. Titles at the end inform filmviewers of later developments; for example, a suspected ringleader in the kidnapping is arrested and shipped to Guantánamo. The movie features the extraordinarily thorough manner in which Pakistani police try to track down Pearl’s whereabouts, including a scene where one prisoner is forced, presumably by torture, to confess a lead. Gilani, it turns out, knew nothing of the kidnap plot. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart implies that the decision to rough up Pearl was in retaliation for the mass arrest of Afghans and Pakistanis and their well-publicized mistreatment upon reaching Guantánamo, since a photograph of Pearl shows him in a stress position similar to televised images of the Guantánamo detainees. Downplayed also are demands made by the kidnappers, though there is film footage of a refusal by Secretary of State Colin Powell to negotiate with the kidnappers because they are terrorists. The Political Film Society has nominated A Mighty Heart as best film exposé of 2007. MH
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