I started this post thinking it would be about some of the brouhaha (or is this more of a hullabaloo?) about Angelina Jolie portraying Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart. Beauty as Power has a nice post on the choice as a race issue. The post also includes some background and interview material from Defamer, People, and msNBC, whose various responses to Jolie playing a women of African descent range from accusations of her doing “blackface,” (msNBC) to the suggestion that she has only donned “bronzer and a wig” (Defamer) and also Cinematical).
I’ll come back to this– accusations of whitewashing, blackfacing, and so on– in my next post. But before we jump into the racial representation issue, we should first look at Pearl and Jolie’s story of how they came to be friends through mutual admiration, each seeing the other on screen and realizing that they might be BFF. In an interview in this month’s Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive declares that “Less than five minutes into our conversation, it’s clear that the bond between these two women is warm, respectful and real.”
I totally buy it, because they are both just wide-open empathy-machines. I spent some time at Pearl’s Global Diary site at Glamour. Every story contains some moment of primal connection with her subject-women. One could imagine that, if Jolie were a reporter writing about women in the wake of 9/11, she might be Mariane Pearl. And if Mariane Pearl were an actress trying to, I don’t know, change the world through adoption, she would be Jolie. Or Josephine Baker. I am unclear.
The point is, connection in gender, temperment, and class (frankly) all stand to trump race, which goes unmentioned in the online interview. I’ll get my hands on the hard copy tomorrow, and make this a better post. But for now suffice to say that, while I am willing to buy the idea that Pearl and Jolie are simpatico, I do find it strange that the article never approaches the most notable aspect of the decision. The decision to cast Jolie as a woman of color is second only to the fact that the film is being produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company. This latter matter, however, is referenced quite compulsively throughout, mainly in all parties pointing out that Pitt committed to the film before his involvement with Jolie.
So we’re to imagine that that awkwardness has been cleared away. So why not at least mention the brown thing?
Or, to read it another way, might we imagine that that is what the whole simpatico thing is really about, consciously or unconsciously?
6/24/07: I’m adding this video b/c it touches this sense of the simpatico and this sort of heavy valuation of global empathy…
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