A mighty heart

It was a powerful, but painful movie to watch.

Especially the scream… the long, howling wail as the wife discovers after almost two weeks of waiting and hoping that her husband, who simply disappeared, had been brutally beheaded by Jihadi kidnappers. The scream, her banging against the walls, the tears streaming down her already darkened eyes from lack of sleep, the saliva clinging onto the corners of her mouth as she wails, and wails and wails till there’s nothing else to wail but a heart-wrenching emptiness.

Nobody can imagine what it’s like to loose a beloved. Nobody can imagine what it’s like to wave goodbye to your beloved, believing later that night you’d meet again. Nobody can feel the pain and sorrow of Marianne Pearl.

A … Heart is a really touching movie based on the true story of a wife’s search for her husband after his unexplained disappearance in 2002. The main characters are no other than Wall Street Journal journalist Danny Pearl (…), who on his final day conducting investigative journalism in bustling Karachi was lured into a set-up by a terrorist cell and held hostage for many days.

What follows is the undying faith of his wife (Angelina Jolie) in love being able to survive and be felt despite the unknowns, despite the separation. Feelings more accentuated as she was at the time carrying his then five-months old baby in her. Within two hours, the movie is a powerful mix between intrigue, thriller, and suspense, captured in chaotic scenes, and depicting the consequences of the ‘humane treatment’ of (so-called) “illegal combatants” held captive at Guantanamo Bay, and what tormenting consequences it had on the Pearl family as events unfolded. It shows how the worst excesses of misguided foreign policies and wounded national prides can so perfectly intertwine with the deep-seated fanatism and hatred that can lead to such extremes of compelling people to hurt and instill fear into others in the name of the religion, and of vengeance. Anger leads to anger, and leads to violence, and leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of anger and violence that fuels feelings of ‘them against us’.

The husband does die. But the wife is brave and fights back the tears on TV. How many people are kidnapped everyday in Pakistan (or the rest of the world for that matter) and do we not feel their pain too, she asks. Indeed, in a fast-paced need for news, sensationalism and snapshots of weeping relatives seem to sell better than how people really feel. With the journalists brandishing cameras and constantly creating a nauseating fever and frenzy with their blinding flashes, there is a subtle critique perhaps that is best echoed in the line “Have you no soul?” which Marianne Pearl harks back at a TV interviewer. We may hope that those words echo stronger and linger longer than the few seconds that they spread in living rooms worldwide.

Most moving of all, strangely perhaps, was the moment when she gave birth. A moment of release… a moment of long-awaited anticipation… a moment of joy, that after all the waiting and longing, it was not in vain.

Birth after death, creation after destruction, love after hatred.