Beyond the Multiplex

Brad and Angelina walk Cannes' red carpet for "A Mighty Heart." Plus: More tales of existential angst from the Coens and Gus Van Sant.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Cormac McCarthy, Cannes, Movies, Brad Pitt, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Angelina Jolie, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Paramount Vantage

Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in "A Mighty Heart."

May 21, 2007 | CANNES, France -- Having climbed the fabled carpeted steps of the Grand Théâtre Lumière three times in the past 48 hours, I have this to say: That red carpet's looking pretty damn dirty. Up close, it strongly resembles that indoor-outdoor carpeting from Lowe's, made out of some thin, hard-wearing synthetic, that your aunt and uncle installed in the rec room.

This might be a metaphor for something, or might not. Either way, this year's collection of Cannes films, which looked so alluring from across the sea, is almost uniformly dark to this point. Even given international art cinema's propensity for self-seriousness, Cannes at the halfway point has been a festival of pointless killings, innocents unfairly persecuted, investigations that go nowhere and sex scenes crafted for maximum discomfort and minimum arousal. And then there are the movies!

That was a joke. I am talking about the movies. But the contrast between the dire, dour, downer cinema on display and the louche, idyllic surroundings here is -- well, "ironic" doesn't come close. It's utterly bizarre is what it is. Sunday night I sat through Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's "Import Export," a docudrama in competition here that offers two and a half hours of squalor tourism through the most horrible spots of central and eastern Europe. We visit an Internet-porn production facility in Ukraine, where women writhe in rows of cubicles for online customers; an unbelievably filthy housing complex in Slovakia, whose residents simply dump garbage behind the buildings in huge piles; a geriatric hospital in Vienna, Austria, full of toothless and delirious dying patients. At least in the dive bar where you can recruit a hooker to get naked and crawl around on a leash for 50 euros, it appeared that people had recently eaten, and you could see the floor.

Then it was back out into the night for a salade niçoise, made right in front of me with fresh tuna and crisp green beans. Yum! And, gee, it's true what they say here about this year's new rosé, isn't it? And now let's move on to the Brangelina news.

Actually, I just saw Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, looking restrained and sober in a tan suit and brown knee-length dress (respectively), on their way out of the press conference for "A Mighty Heart," in which Jolie stars and which Pitt helped produce. They'll stroll up that dirty red carpet on Monday night, and Pitt will return on Thursday with Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's Thirteen." (Both films are premiering out of competition.) Star power aside, "A Mighty Heart" isn't exactly a rousing up-with-people movie either, given that Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, whose husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (played by Dan Futterman), was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan. (Mariane Pearl has written for Salon.)

"A Mighty Heart" will open worldwide next month, and I'll leave the heavy-lifting review duties to my colleague Stephanie Zacharek. Suffice it to say that this film is bound to provoke some controversy, although for the most part it plays like a straightforward, highly competent thriller. As you'd expect from English director Michael Winterbottom, the picture possesses levels of moral complication that are at first invisible; it feels like an extra-long episode of "24" with a bad conscience and a bad ending. Jolie's performance is restrained and dignified, and with her hair in Mediterranean curls, she actually bears a strong resemblance to Pearl, a Parisian woman of mixed racial heritage. (Winterbottom has observed that trying to find an actress who was half Dutch, a quarter Cuban and a quarter Chinese was not realistic.)

But Mariane Pearl is not really at the center of Winterbottom's film, even though it was adapted from her memoir. What Pearl principally does in the story, after all, is sit around the Karachi villa of her friend Asra Nomani (played by Archie Panjabi in the film, Nomani is an American journalist of Indian heritage who has reported for Salon and other publications), waiting for her worst fears about what has happened to her husband to be fulfilled. So for both dramatic and philosophical reasons, John Orloff's script moves back and forth between Mariane's private agony and the murkier, larger story of Pakistani and American authorities' hunt for Daniel Pearl's kidnappers.

Next page: A collective loss of faith in authority?