Don146;t look for Danny

Slowly, as the scenes ticked by, my heart sank. I could live with having been reduced from a colleague of Danny8217;s to a 8220;charming assistant8221; to Mariane, as one review put it, and even with having been cut out of the scene in front of my house in Pakistan. That8217;s the creative license Hollywood takes. What I couldn8217;t accept was that Danny himself had been cut from his own story.

The character I saw on the screen was flat 8212; nerdy, bland and boring. He8217;s not at all like Danny, who wrote 8220;ditties8221; about Osama bin Laden while he was investigating Pakistan8217;s nuclear secrets and jihadist groups as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. On screen, he8217;s warned three times to meet with Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani 8212; the man with whom he thought he had an interview 8212; only in public. But off he goes, ignoring the warnings. The message: Reckless journalist.That was nothing like the Danny I knew. As the credits rolled, I murmured to my mother, 8220;Danny had a cameo in his own murder.8221;

For me, watching the movie was like having people enter my home, rearrange the furniture and reprogramme my memory. I thought the movie had the potential to be meaningful. I hoped it could spark a search for the truth behind Danny8217;s death. But the moviemakers and their PR machine seemed intent on two very different and much shallower goals: creating a mega-star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, who plays Mariane, and promoting the cliched idea that both Danny and Mariane were 8216;ordinary heroes.8217;

I think Danny would have rolled his eyes at that.

In the prologue to her book, Mariane wrote to her son: 8220;I write this book for you, Adam, so you know that your father was not a hero but an ordinary man.8221; In a movie voiceover, that dedication becomes: 8220;This film is for our son so he knows that his father was an ordinary man. An ordinary hero.8221;

But there weren8217;t any real heroes in the story of Danny8217;s tragedy. Danny would have said he was just doing his job. When he went off that day in Karachi, he didn8217;t give any impression that he thought what he was doing was especially dangerous. After he vanished, I don8217;t think any of us, not even Mariane, did anything particularly courageous, either. We each had a duty to try to find him 8212; either as professionals or because of the bonds of friendship or family.

I know that it8217;s natural to search for a compelling narrative structure to make sense of tragedy and pointlessness. And I do believe that Danny8217;s last moments, as he declared his Jewishness for his kidnappers8217; video camera, showed his strength of character. But recasting a story just so we can tell ourselves that we8217;ve found a hero is too easy. For me, A Mighty Heart and all the hype surrounding it have only underscored how cheap and manufactured our quest for heroism has become. As one person involved in the production candidly told me: Danny can8217;t do interviews. So in the Associated Press, he amounts to nothing more than a parenthetical phrase.

But Danny was not parenthetical. He deserves to be remembered fully. The year before he died, he faxed me an article from an Indian magazine that he thought would help with my research. 8220;From your assistant, Danny,8221; he scrawled across the cover, in his self-deprecating style.

Don8217;t look for that personality in the movie. You won8217;t find it.