Of course, no one should have anything but the deepest sympathy
for the family of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s
reporter who was kidnapped and gruesomely murdered in Pakistan five
years ago and who is the subject of Michael Winterbottom’s fine new
film, A Mighty Heart. Yet I hope that they and others will
forgive me for asking the perhaps indelicate question why it is
that, of all the Americans who have been killed by Islamicist
fanatics in the last few years, he is the only one (so far) about
whom a movie has been made? Why is there a special poignancy to his
fate that is denied both to soldiers, who have chosen to fight
against the jihadist menace, and to non-journalist victims of jihad
whose innocence — in, for example, just turning up to work one day
at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon — might seem to be less
complicated than poor Mr. Pearl’s.
Well, the media celebrate their own. In their eyes, the
journalist can combine the nobility of the soldier — “an ordinary
hero,” as the film puts it of Daniel Pearl — with the purity of
the innocent because the mythology of the contemporary media
culture insists on placing the journalist above the battle. The
whole point of him is that he doesn’t take sides, so it seems
particularly unfair when one side insists on treating him like an
enemy combatant. In Mr. Pearl’s case, this sense of unfairness was
exacerbated by the fact that it seems to have been his Jewishness
that inspired his kidnappers to kill him. Not that they couldn’t
have killed him just for being an American as well as just for
being a Jew, but the combination of the two made it more likely.
And both are accidents of birth. Pearl was not only beheaded, he
was discriminated against!
All this is not to say that his is not a powerful story, or that
it is not powerfully told in A Mighty Heart. It’s just
that it’s mainly as an absence that he is present in it. For Mr.
Winterbottom very cleverly tells the story so much from the point
of view of the murdered man’s wife, Marianne (Angelina Jolie), that
we know almost no more of what happens to him, or when it happens,
than she does. Her last glimpse of “Danny” (Dan Futterman) comes as
he is getting into a taxi outside their home in Karachi. We follow
him a little further — until the taxi drops him at the restaurant
somewhere in the vast, sprawling Pakistani city, where he was to
have met a source for a story he was doing on the shoe-bomber,
Richard Reid. But the source isn’t there, and that’s when the
camera leaves him, wondering whether to wait or to go back home and
aware, as we must be, of his vulnerability, all alone in this
strange place.
We are not, that is, shown the kidnapping, nor anything more of
his captivity than Marianne learns from a videotape sent by the
kidnappers. Nor, it must go without saying, are we shown his
murder. You might be tempted to wonder what is the point of such
reticence, since the audience will already know — as in the film,
of course, Marianne doesn’t — what is happening. But there is some
method to the cinematic madness. By not attempting to imagine what
he does not know, Mr. Winterbottom forces our imaginations to run
wild in a way not entirely dissimilar, I imagine, from the way the
imaginations of the victim’s loved ones do in such circumstances.
One’s chief impressions of the film are of claustrophobia and
helplessness, the uselessness of people’s sympathy and
hopelessness, for the most part, of the Pakistani authorities, in
spite of their willingness to use torture to get information. But
then that’s very much like what Mrs. Pearl herself must have felt
at the time.
At any rate, it helps to give us a powerful sense of empathy
with her as her imaginative life whisks her back and forth between
the desperate search for Danny in the present and flashbacks to the
happy scenes of their courtship and marriage that naturally
increase the poignancy and thus the sense of urgency of the search.
In one such tender scene, just before his kidnapping on the eve of
what was to have been their departure from Pakistan, Danny fondles
Marianne’s pregnant belly and says, “Amazing how you can love
someone you never met.” It’s not so amazing that the film also
makes us care about the Pearls. And, though Danny Pearl doesn’t
have quite the innocence of a babe in the womb, we may
begin to think so. He certainly has something of its helplessness
and, therefore, the same ability to inspire solicitude.
Historically, the expression “a mighty heart” carries the
connotation of courage and intrepidity in battle of the bravest
soldiers and would be expected to refer to Daniel Pearl. In this
film, however, Braveheart is mostly off-screen and the expression
seems instead to refer to the large capacity for feeling and
suffering of his wife. There is a huge cultural shift behind this
apparent continuity of heroic language.
Moreover, as I suggested at the outset, there is a political
dimension to this innocence that it may seem somewhat lacking in
delicacy to point out. There are in the film implied criticisms of
the Wall Street Journal for sharing information on matters
of national security with the CIA because this increases the danger
to Danny. The kidnappers must see themselves as vindicated in their
belief that he is little better than an agent of the CIA — or of
Mossad — himself. Not that we would or should care any less about
what happens to him if he were, but it’s his not being one
which creates the kick of indignation and pathos that gets a film
like this one made.
It makes sense for Marianne to resent anything that materially
increases the danger to her husband, but those of us watching a
cinematic re-creation have less of an excuse for objecting to a
blurring of the line between the determined neutrality of the
journalist and the unwilling engagement in the war on terror of his
fellow countrymen. For it seems to me that that neutrality is not a
real option. To be a journalist devoted to free inquiry, as to be
an American devoted to other sorts of civic freedoms, is already to
be enlisted in the war against those who would destroy those
freedoms. It would better serve Daniel Pearl’s memory to admit that
his sad fate has made this clear.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
He is the author of the recent book, Honor: A History (Encounter
Books).
