An intense, fast-moving film was made from journalist Mariane Pearl’s book about the kidnapping and murder of her husband Daniel, also a journalist, by Islamicist fanatics in Pakistan. The movie, bearing the same title as the book, is A Mighty Heart (2007) and is patently built around the theme of anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment in Muslim jihadism.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Heart is a detailed piece of journalistic cinema like All the President’s Men, than which it is a better film. The stakes here are higher and the film knows it. Angelina Jolie is thoughtfully remarkable as Mariane Pearl, a stoic (and pregnant) woman who loves her husband. Denis O’Hare does some marvelously grounded acting as a Wall Street Journal publisher. Irrfan Khan is very good as a Pakistani police captain, and Will Patton (as Randall) is satisfyingly earthy. A Mighty Heart is earthy. And, in its own way, brutal.

Reviews by Dean

I generally dislike the films of Ingmar Bergman, and Cries and Whispers (1972) is no exception.  It’s a lousy period piece set in the early 20th century and, even though it does a fine job of concentrating on human suffering as a reality of both the past and the present, it offers one specious or absurd moment after another.  Harriet Andersson is magnificent as an ailing and agonized woman; Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin are strong actresses too, but what Bergman does with them is merely embarrassing.

A Bergman film and so not a happy one, Cries and Whispers reminds us there is such a thing as human comfort–comfort from other human beings (sinful creatures though we are)— but little or no divine comfort.  Indeed, a clergyman (!) speaks of people living “under a grim and empty sky” in what is a particularly ridiculous eulogy.

Spare me this film as I would have liked Andersson’s Agnes to be spared her pain.

Cover of Cries & Whispers – Criterion Collection

In colonized South Africa, Sonia lives with her husband Jannie on a farm until Jannie is packed off to prison. The man shot to death a 12-year-old black boy for watching Sonia, through a half-open curtain, suckle the couple’s baby. Narrated by an unnamed nurse who befriends Sonia, the Muriel Spark short story, “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze,” then informs us of the inheritance money that renders Sonia rich and of the guidance she receives from the nurse and others. Guidance, that is, for living up to certain social standards. A changed woman now, Sonia, though still married to Jannie, is en route to taking a lover named Frank.

There is in this tale social climbing and relationship folly on the one hand, and brutal behavior on the other. Sonia never grasps the seriousness of Jannie’s murder of a child; what matters is advancement for the nouveau riche. The narrating nurse, however, is convinced there is in the colony a “savage territory beyond the absurd drawing-room.” A critic of the territory and of the times with their “encroaching slackness”—partly because she has been wronged by boyfriend Frank—the nurse finally longs to leave the place “for dear life.” The curtain blown by the breeze symbolizes sudden changes both agreeable and awful.

Spark’s story is moral but un-moralistic as well as piercing and droll. Typical Muriel Spark, which is good.

L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between,” unread by me, might be successful, but I deem the 1971 film version an interesting failure. Directed by Joseph Losey and scripted by Harold Pinter, it is set in turn-of-the-century England and tells of a boy, Leo, who is enlisted to be the go-between for two lovers—Marian and Ted—from different social classes. He delivers letters for them and the affair is clandestine. Much to Leo’s consternation, however, Marian is soon engaged to be married to prosperous Hugh Trimingham but remains involved with Ted. A story of innocence and experience, it is nicely cinematically crafted in several ways.

What exactly does Marian see in Ted, though? What kind of person is she? We do not know. And I sense that Julie Christie is not quite the actress to play her. She has charm but that’s all. Further, I disesteem Edward Fox as Trimingham, whereas Alan Bates is manfully persuasive as Ted. Dominic Guard is okay as Leo. By no means can they save “The Go-Between,” however, which is not even dramatically meaty at all. There is nothing gripping about Marian’s anxious mother (Margaret Leighton) rushing in the rain with Leo to try to catch her daughter with Ted. Still, as I said, the film is interesting.

Needless to say, Stanley Kubrick‘s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) is loaded with brilliant scenes and images. A lone astronaut, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), floats in the zero-gravity inner compartment of the HAL computer as he listens to an on-screen scientist report the news about extraterrestrial life. There is something chilling about it. The upside-down flight attendant on the space shuttle becomes right-side-up in the pilots’ cockpit. The frequent “virtual” contact with people on the earth, as much as, say, 300 million miles away. A very elderly Bowman lying on a bed before a later shot reveals him to be wrapped in striking light and, in fact, a new being.

Except for “Dr. Strangelove,” Kubrick’s best films were made in the Fifties and Sixties. Some of the meaning in “2001” is too private, but the film is wonderfully mysterious. All the same, I must say I don’t believe that human beings evolved from animals.