VIEW FILM STILLS: A Mighty Heart VIEW RED CARPET: Cannes premiere READ MORE: Brangelina Come to Cannes

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 6/20/07)

Co-producer Brad Pitt and star Angelina Jolie (who, aside from being professional partners here, are apparently romantically involved) have enough clout between them that they could have made a major Hollywood production out of A Mighty Heart, the cinematic adaptation of a memoir by Mariane Pearl. They could have glossed it up with expansive location shooting, commissioned a heart-tugging score — done any number of things to pump the putative accessibility and emotional impact of the true-life tale of journalist Danny Pearl's 2002 abduction and execution by terrorists in Pakistan and the efforts of his wife, Mariane (then pregnant with their child), to secure his release.

• Film stills • Cannes premiere • Brangelina Come to Cannes

But Pitt and Jolie didn't go Hollywood. They kept their budget (relatively) small: $20 million. They picked the prolific, fast-shooting, smart, and largely unsentimental Michael Winterbottom to direct. And while they did location shooting in India (which turned into a media circus, predictably enough), the filmmakers did not go for David Lean-style sweep. This is a movie that's about, among other things, intimacy — the kind of intimacy that forms quickly between people thrown together to deal with a crisis. When Dan Futterman's likable, straight-shooting Pearl goes missing after he's supposed to meet with a terrorism-implicated sheik, wife Mariane, rather than falling apart, becomes a sort of team captain, rallying the efforts of a Pakistani police captain, an American diplomat, the journalist friend whose house becomes the investigation's HQ, and some of Danny's colleagues from the Wall Street Journal, all of whom spend much of their time sitting around a table talking into cell phones, waiting for faxes, and writing on boards.

The ever astute Winterbottom casts the film as a procedural and an ensemble piece. Contrary to what many might have inferred from the production stills, official-and-non, that emerged during the making of the film, this is not a picture wherein a lone Mariane Pearl wanders wide-eyed through the streets of Karachi in a heroic search for her missing spouse.