Film review: "A Mighty Heart"

At a certain level, all tragic stories have an uplifting quality. Whether we witness the silent horror of thousands of Jewish eyeglasses collected at the Auschwitz concentration camp or we hear the screams of Indian women massacred in their sleep by the U.S. Calvary, we have a sense that this distant pain is somehow ours as well. Despite differences of race or nationality or religion, at a deeper level we share the common human experience of pain and death. The “other” becomes “us” and we grow just a bit.

This noble impulse can be manipulated, of course. A film like “Saving Private Ryan” can have the effect of deadening us to human suffering, merely through the repeated onslaught of violence. Films too numerous to mention have used violence and horror to call forth a bloodthirsty demand for vengeance against “other,” which we further dehumanize by calling Jap or Gook or Kraut or Raghead.

In the film “A Mighty Heart” I felt a huge ambiguity between these two purposes. When Mariane Pearl learns of her husband Danny’s death, her keening was completely real to me. (As one who has also experienced the sudden death of a spouse, I remember that awful sound and what it felt like coming from my own body.) Yet what are we meant to feel, given the depth of horror and shock she felt? Are we meant to assign fault and seek revenge, or can we simply stay in that profound moment of limitless loss?

The film is structured as a straightforward, even journalistic story. One review called the film a “police procedurial.” First this happened, then that happened, then the next thing happened. Danny Pearl cuddles his pregnant wife, has some worries about the interview, gets kidnapped, gets killed. His wife Mariane handles it all so well.

Nasty characters appear, like “Captain,” the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency (I.S.I.) counter-terrorism office, who regularly tortures people as a routine part of his job. Or there is Omar Sheikh, who apparently planned the whole job and who kills and tortures people from some sense of Pakistani patriotism and religious fervor. The worst is perhaps American security attaché Randall Bennet, who seems not to have any strong religious or ideological motivation, but who simply likes to witness suffering.

But why did Daniel Pearl die? In the movie, it seems simple. It is posited that it got out that he was Jewish and that he was picked by al Qaeda simply on the basis of his nationality and religious heritage. But that is simply not what most investigations have concluded. The famous French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy wrote a book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” that has become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. After many months of research and multiple trips to Pakistan, Levy concludes that Pearl was on the verge of exposing the connection between the Pakistani intelligence agency I.S.I., the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, al Qaeda and the weapons program in North Korea. Or, as the Chicago Sun Times ventures, Pearl was “killed because he knew too much.”

In the book “A Mighty Heart” (which inspired the movie), Mariane Pearl concurs. Oddly, that conclusion simply didn’t make it into the movie.

So what is the truth? It is hard to say. Certainly, it is quite possible that Daniel Pearl was killed because of his parents’ faith. Certainly we have seen cases where people have been rounded up and expelled or imprisoned for years, even killed because of their nationalities. In fact, the principal demand of Pearl’s kidnappers was that Pakistanis being held in Guantanamo be released.

The film barely touches any of this, however. A tragedy has occurred, and we may perhaps call for an airstrike, but it isn’t even clear who should be punished. Several characters in the film advocate vengeance, and in fact it is fairly clear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who ordered Pearls kidnapping, has been tortured for years in Pakistani and U.S. custody. It has even been reported in several sources (The New Republic, the Sunday Telegraph of London and elsewhere) that KSM’s 7 and 9-year-old children are being held by the C.I.A. and perhaps have been subjected to torture as well.

So the film “A Mighty Heart” remains deeply unsatisfying. It is a cartoon tragedy, in a way, subject to the biases we bring to it. If we are inclined toward hatred and revenge, then the horrible events would seem to justify whatever torture or inhumanity we might produce. If we are inclined to forgiveness and reconciliation, then Danny and Mariane Pearl stand with us as we seek truth and our common humanity. In the end, the film itself takes us to no deeper understanding. It merely leaves us like the glass Pearl stepped on at his Jewish/Buddhist wedding: broken. An eye for an eye, as Gandhi said, has left us all blind.

When all is said and done, I cannot really recommend “A Mighty Heart.” What I recommend instead is director Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 docudrama “The Road to Guantanamo.” It’s 93 minutes and you can see it streamed free by doing a google video search for the title. It’s the same director, but a much more informative film.