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Trailer for "A Mighty Heart"

Over the last five years, more than 230 journalists have been killed around the world. Each year alarming numbers of reporters, photographers and allied personnel die, some as the result of international efforts, some as collateral damage in armed conflicts they’re trying to cover, some in disturbingly ambiguous circumstances. The war in Iraq has resulted in the destruction of about 140 of these men and women.

The United States armed forces, whether through design or only reckless stupidity, have contributed to this total. Several years ago, a US Army unit shelled the Baghdad offices of the Arab television network Al Jazeera, one of the Bush administration’s broadcast bêtes noires.

Most of these casualties are of uncelebrated people, unknown or ill-remembered by the public, but early in 2002, the fate of one foreign correspondent became a matter of anxious concern and shock for people across the globe, ordinary ones and international dignitaries, including heads of state. Daniel Pearl was the South Asia Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal when he was abducted on January 23, 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan by Islamist zealots. They lured him into an ambush by holding out the false promise of an interview with a fundamentalist sheik with alleged links to captured “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. Less than two weeks later, his savage captors barbarically murdered Pearl. Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart is the closely adapted film from the memoir of the same name by his wife, Mariane Pearl.

Her title alludes to her husband, who by all accounts was not only a resourceful, dedicated and fair journalist, but a courageous one, a fact grimly underscored by his fierce defiance during his brief captivity, according to some of the captors who were later apprehended. The title will probably be popularly associated with his wife, whose own courage and magnanimity have been widely remarked on. She’s personified in this film by Angelina Jolie, and the performance is largely persuasive and moving (even if the actress’s French accent slips here and there).

While Winterbottom by no means slights Daniel Pearl’s unquestioned mettle and plight, of necessity he concentrates on Pearl’s spouse and her conduct during the ordeal that followed his disappearance. Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude the Obscure) has produced a tense, rapidly propelled and sometimes compelling film from John Orloff’s screenplay, but one which, somewhat curiously, at least slightly vitiates the focus on Mariane Pearl’s experience and point of view.

A Mighty Heart does provide some sense of the interactive fear, anger, confusion and intensity of effort that must have characterized the atmosphere in the Pearls’ Karachi home as the wide-ranging, desperate search continued through hope and stressful apprehension. Film can deliver a visceral experience that literature can’t usually equal, and, in this case, Winterbottom has adopted a vérité, Direct Cinema approach. His film is structured with a documentarist’s distancing, wide-scope methods: The movie’s events move with a rapid-fire sequencing, choppily joined with abrupt cuts and interrupted by flashes backward in time. At intervals, teletype-style datelines and identifications overlie shots.

This stylization promotes a sense of being in the moment, a sometimes frenetic intimacy, but it can also discourage an emotional or reflective response.

A couple of years ago, Winterbottom experimented with a hybrid of drama and documentary in Road to Guantanamo, about three young Pakistani-Englishmen ensnared in America’s enemy combatant status. This time, his direction is more conventional, although his movie is edgier.

He’s assembled a highly proficient international cast. As Pearl, Dan Futterman does as much as can be expected with his intermittent appearances throughout the movie. Will Patton is Randall Bennett, a US State Department security officer who comes across, perhaps unintentionally, as a slightly disquieting sort, one who grooves on intrigue and violence (although in her book, Pearl expresses admiration for him). Irrfan Khan is an impressively resolute, calm and dignified Pakistani counter-terrorism official, even as he engages in some glimpsed treatment of suspects that would probably pass muster by rightist autocrats like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Berkeley law professor John Yoo.

The international concern and sorrow over Pearl’s fate may actually belong to a prior, pre-Iraq war period. Ferocity and anguish are more prevalent now.

Ironically, the professional role Daniel Pearl tried to fill is jeopardized now by much more than hate-filled jihadists. Billionaires pursuing buyouts and “restructuring” of news organizations are threatening the viability of international coverage. Conglomerating media baron Rupert Murdoch is currently laying siege to Pearl’s Journal and its owners. The paper’s respected foreign reporting may become another kind of casualty, one produced by depredatory market players more effective, if less fearsome, than any jihadist could hope to be.