PC carping greeted the premiere of A Mighty Heart at Cannes. Complaints centered on why a lamely accented Caucasian American was cast as the Parisian, Dutch-Afro-Cuban heroine, who may have struck up a liaison with the married CNN head of coverage of the events and who publically equated her personal anguish to that of Pakistanis at the killing of ten of their own.

Such cavils are wide of the mark, for Michael Winterbottom’s entry deservedly received high marks from critics and public, while Angelina Jolie gives her strongest performance as defiant Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl. John Orloff’s script comes from Pearl’s account, subtitled The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, of the notorious kidnapping and videotaped beheading of Danny, but the mixed professional and amateur international cast members were encouraged to get to know their real-life counterparts and improvise from there. Little is made of either Danny’s secular Jewishness or her Buddhist beliefs, but Jolie is excellent as the six-months-pregnant wife keeping up her self-control under unimaginable circumstances and, going to an empty room, breaking for only brief seconds of soul’s agony. Indeed, before leave-taking, she makes time to commend and comfort the gaggle that has surrounded her strength and pain and worked, competently or not, to avert the catastrophe.

That sad outcome already a given, the docudrama reflects its director’s non-fiction experience while building tension through contrasted poles of Mariane and external happenings. That woman, the calm eye of an international hurricane of chaos and conflict, begins with voice-over exposition, soon dropped and presumably the tone of the written memoir, a mother’s striving to introduce their son Adam (Nassim Benbrik, four years old at the end and living with her in France) to the father he would never meet.

The part of Wall Street Journal South Asia Bureau Chief Danny (Dan Futterman) is necessarily static, acted upon rather than acting, fleshed into no more than semi-reality through short home movie-type flashbacks and conjectural reconstructions of his movements that January 2002 as he sought advice and then set off, supposedly through Karachi cleric Sheikh Ali Gilani (Ikram Bhatti) to research militant Islamic links to so-called American Airlines shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Also journalist Mariane emerges as much from what she does not do or say as from what she does, for Jolie impresses us with the character’s enormous willpower. Even with potential shoulders to cry on in friend and Danny’s colleague Asra Nomani (Archie Punjabi) and sympathetic security man Randall Bennett (Will Patton), plus the quietly reassuring Captain (Irrfan Khan) of Pakistan’s recently recruited counter-terrorism squad, her rôle is to hold it in, avoid panic or excess, and function as a dignified center around which to organize the manhunt.

Cynosure she is, too, the expectant 34-year-old, of the expanding apparatuses of official and clandestine multi-government agencies, the NGOs and print and television journalism that includes Danny’s WSJ, domestic staff, the ordinary citizens and those suspected of (only sometimes proved) terrorist involvement. More cautious about finger-pointing than The Road to Guantanamo, and done largely on handheld DV in approaching-monsoon Pakistan and India, the story jumps back and forth between the core, on the one hand, and daily street and market scenes, rooftops and barbed wire, mad traffic, nocturnal police roundups of men and hard drives, cell-phone conversations, politicians’ disclaimers, rumors and false leads.

This second pole, that of the surrounding maelstrom threatening to overwhelm the kidnapping itself, well conveys the real lack of understanding of those intruding into this most volatile area and of the mutual jealousies and withheld information among, say, FBI (Jullian Armenante), CIA, foreign law enforcement, consular corps and media. Within terrorist-slash-freedom fighter ranks, as well, there is no clear demarcation of what Mariane would later describe to Larry King as “a murky network.” Although perhaps the long-planned work of a National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, and although a few impassive ringleaders and goons are caught and sentenced, the abduction and execution cannot be one hundred percent resolved. The unfortunate victim is variously accused of CIA or, his religion coming out, Israeli Mossad ties, perhaps ransom is demanded or a release of prisoners, Guantánamo conditions are cited, and, the video of the decapitation not shown but reflected in viewers’ faces, hapless pawn Pearl becomes a statistic.

Had A Mighty Heart been merely for son Adam, there would have been no print and subsequent cinema exposure. By putting a face to this one death among thousands, but not “a country or a flag . . . religion, race or nationality,” and asking for justice over revenge, this public airing may help to halt madness and heal wounds. 

(Released by Paramount Vantage and rated “R” for language.)