- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday January 29 2008 12.54 GMT
Angelina Jolie has been such a singular presence in movies that I'd forgotten how good she could be: nothing since her Oscar-winning role in Girl, Interrupted has called on her to inhabit a troubled character like this and carry a film. A Mighty Heart is adapted from a book by the real-life Mariane Pearl, whose husband's fate is as well-known as it is tragic. That's the film's big problem: there's no tension and no chance of a Hollywood happy ending. We know from the off that there's misery up ahead, and that's where we're headed. The movie seems to exist as a tribute to Daniel, the murdered journalist at its centre, but this is his wife's story and it comes as a relief that Jolie never plays it in the tradition of the sobbing wife back home. Mariane is a reporter too and she is portrayed as a tough, defiant woman holding things together under horrible stress until she lets it go in one great and very moving outpouring of grief.
Director Michael Winterbottom has been a specialist in east-west tension lately, notably in In This World and The Road to Guantánamo, and he uses the film's central location, scruffy, crowded and palpably unstable Karachi, almost as an extra character. But whereas United 93 got away with our foreknowledge because it was a unique occurrence and we had all thought how we might have reacted from seat 19B, the Pearl abduction, for all its sadness and horror, was just another kidnap. In screen terms, we've all lived through plenty of those and Winterbottom uses very few flashbacks to the couple's happier times, which could have drawn us in by contrast.
