KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Running time: 103 mins
Rating: M, offensive language, content may disturb
Screening: Hoyts, Rialto, SkyCity
Verdict: A precise and unsensational retelling of the Daniel Pearl story from the viewpoint of his wife feels faintly voyeuristic.
We know what happened in Karachi in January 2002: Daniel Pearl, Wall Street Journal reporter, was abducted and, sometime during the next month, his gruesome slaughter was filmed and the videotape sent to those waiting for word of him.
So whatever drama English director Winterbottom generates in his scrupulous, precise and unsensational retelling of the events of that month, it isn't about what happens in the end. It's about ...
Well, what exactly? The versatile Winterbottom has told stories on the edge of the war on terror before - both Welcome to Guantanamo and In This World were infused with a righteous rage - but this is not a political film that targets Pearl's killers or the White House policy that inflames them. It's rather the study of Marianne (Jolie), Pearl's widow-in-waiting, and it feels faintly voyeuristic to be admitted so deeply into grief, albeit in facsimile. The suspense is in whether Jolie is up to the challenges of the role.
Anyone who remembers her Oscar-winning sociopath Lisa in 1999's Girl Interrupted already knows the answer to that (even if Pearl's Afro-Cuban-Dutch accent rather eludes her). When she absorbs - even though she has not seen it - what has happened to Daniel and she takes her pain into the next room, Winterbottom's (typically hand-held) camera follows and maintains a tentative distance as she stands, back to camera, and emits a howl that seems to last for ever and plumb the depths of hell. It's a mesmerising moment, but even as my neck-hair stood on end I couldn't help wondering what purpose was being served except to remind us that Lara Croft can act.
All that said, this is a film that abounds in smart touches. Adapting Pearl's memoir of the same name, writer Joe Orloff crams the story with incidental observations of piercing verisimilitude: a CNN reporter finds Marianne's composure suspect (shades of Lindy Chamberlain and Kate McCann); Marianne ritually lays Daniel's place at dinner; dodgy phone lines cruelly underline her unknowing; the local cop (Khan) is more anxious for Pakistan's reputation than Pearl's welfare.
And it is a film which starts out headlong - the editing in the opening half hour ratchets the tension up - and then becomes the story of a long wait. Marianne is determined to do something, but Jolie's performance shows she's not afraid of stillness.
