Much more than just a Flighty Tart

A year ago, this was perhaps the most talked about film going into production but now that it’s finally released, it has slipped under the radar a bit. Whether it was controversy over Angelina being “blacked up” to play mixed race Mariane Pearl or whether it was the world shifting into its orbit around, eugh, Brangelina, early pictures were everywhere and the focus was immediately taken from the powerful true life story itself.

 

In a move so typical of the celebrity worshipping world of today, Angelina’s story grabbed the limelight while the courageous story of Mariane Pearl whose husband, journalist Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded by a Pakistani militant group, was pushed to the back. Months on and Brad and Angelina are old news while their take (with Brad as producer) on the Pearls’ story gets a chance to shine. But the main problem is the film doesn’t fit well in the cinema mould.

 

It’s a deeply personal story, one woman’s struggle to find her husband in Karachi whilst heavily pregnant and is based on Mariane’s memoirs of the tragic events. Here the story is out of Mariane’s hands and, whilst dealt with skillfully, doesn’t quite keep an audience hooked for the running time. The problem with taking such a recent story is the intrusiveness of the whole thing makes an audience feel like uncomfortable voyeurs and whilst Mariane is not one-dimensional, the story is fundamentally hopeless and would better suit a documentary than a dramatisation.

 

Saying that, were it not for the dramatisation, it would be without Angelina’s performance which should quieten critics and replace “actress” on her CV alongside “publicly vilified scarlet woman”. Her accent holds up and her performance is not based in tears and dramatics like it could have easily been directed. She plays a stronger woman than that and does so with convction, whether or not it was right to cast her when many mixed race actresses would have killed for a role like this. The fact that boyfriend Brad was producing doesn’t imply a large search went on for the best actress for the role but it would have been much easier to bring the race card down had she not carried it off. As it stands however, Jolie seems capable of getting that edge back, and with her turn in Beowulf approaching it’s hard to see her signing on for Tomb Raider 3.

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