When "The Road To Guantanamo" came out a year ago, a lot of people were ready to jump all over director Michael Winterbottom. His film, which portrayed three British men of Pakistani origin who were picked up and incarcerated at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, was seen by some as one-sided "America-bashing."
One suspects, however, that Winterbottom simply felt some sympathy for the unspoken victims of this never-ending "war on terror." Such is the climate of today, though, that expressing sympathy that's not first and foremost for Americans, means that you will be regarded as ideologically suspect. And yet the right of a filmmaker to tell a story, free of the pressure to include the bland and often disingenuous all-around "objectivity" of TV newscasts, should be paramount. One story need not be representative of all stories, a fact often lost on politically correct critics both left and right.
One imagines some of these people are eating crow upon the release of Winterbottom's new film, "A Mighty Heart." This one looks again at the victims in the "war on terror," but this time it's a Western victim, journalist Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic fanatics in Pakistan in 2002. His wife, Mariane, struggled fiercely to find and free him during this captivity, and "A Mighty Heart" is mostly her story.