Jolie's Emotional 'Heart'

A mournful sense of inevitability pervades "A Mighty Heart," in which Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl. Pearl's husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped and held for nine days in Pakistan before being beheaded.

The movie, an adaptation of Mariane's own memoir of the events and directed by Michael Winterbottom, brings that tragedy back with brutally vivid detail as a taut, meticulously crafted police procedural. Part thriller, part melodrama, "A Mighty Heart" recalls last year's "United 93" in its technical prowess and artistry, and in its harrowing emotional arc, one that with luck will inspire viewers but that will just as likely leave them feeling utterly wrung out.

Welcome to the new Cinema of Compulsive Reenactment, wherein unimaginably painful recent events are rushed to the screen with breathless fetishistic detail and whose precise aims are subject to interpretation. In "A Mighty Heart," Winterbottom brings all his talents to bear on a vivid, densely layered portrait, not just of one woman but of a city. With hand-held cameras and a fearless sense of urgency and spontaneity, he plunges viewers into the neon-lit thrum and impossible beauty of Karachi, conveying both its fascination for foreign correspondents like the Pearls, but also the daunting, needle-in-a-haystack task of finding Danny in all that teeming humanity.

Quite wisely, Winterbottom doesn't get too caught up in the tick-tock of Danny's fatal journey, instead using brief flashbacks to speculate on how his abduction occurred. The film instead focuses on Mariane, played by Jolie in brown contact lenses and a diadem of black curls to resemble Mariane. Jolie is a star of such super-stratospheric proportions that the chances of her disappearing into a character role would seem slim at best. But she delivers a restrained, understated performance.

At its core, "A Mighty Heart" is an epic romance, at once doomed and full of hope, about two people in love with the world, even when it didn't love them back.

-- Ann Hornaday

A Mighty Heart R, 100 minutes Contains profanity. Area theaters.