In Hollywood screenplay parlance, there is no “arc” to Mariane Pearl. When we meet her, as played by Angelina Jolie in the film of the book Pearl wrote, “A Mighty Heart,” she is a strong, in-control woman – a smart, tolerant journalist and a no-nonsense wife of another journalist in a part of the world that doesn’t forgive mistakes: Pakistan.

And by the end of the film – when she is as we know her now, as the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and then murdered by terrorists in 2002 – she is still smart, still strong and still tolerant.

Her Frenchwoman’s view of the world is rock solid. Her husband died because terrorism grows where there is poverty, repression, ignorance and fear.

She can cry behind closed doors, scream in paroxysms of grief and almost (but not quite) lose her temper at the bureaucrats, cops, spies and conspiracy-minded Pakistanis she needs to help her track down her missing husband. But she doesn’t give much away.

That could be a frustration in a film less sure-footed than Michael Winterbottom’s meticulous “A Mighty Heart.” The movie doesn’t take you to the cell where Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman) was kept or reveal anything we don’t really know, for sure, about what happened to him. Like “United 93,” it’s a painstaking recreation of what we know, a month in time, a crime and a race against time to find Pearl.

And Jolie’s Mariane takes us behind the scenes of that search and shows us what the woman who showed such a strong face to the TV cameras was truly enduring.

Winterbottom has made his first political film since “Welcome to Sarejevo” (he also did “24 Hour Party People” and “Tristram Shandy”) a riveting Pakistani police procedural, revealing a bureaucracy tainted by its hatred for its non-Muslim neighbor, India, not shy about rounding up “the usual suspects” (and even torturing them), but fully mobilized in a nationwide hunt for one man.

It’s a confusing descent into a morass of places and names as the reporter Mariane pitches in to help (other reporters, from the Journal and elsewhere, join her). Helpfully (to us) she flow-charts the associations that led Danny Pearl to his fateful meeting with a sheik thought to have terror ties.

Jolie’s in-character exotic looks (the real Mariane is of Afro-Cuban and Dutch heritage) never betray her even if the French accent comes and goes. She makes us feel the nagging fear rising in this woman. She knows what can go wrong, and she is quick to demand action when her lifeline to Danny – his cell phone – is lost. But she keeps her cool.

Futterman, in the smaller role, makes Danny quietly heroic. He’s not a hot dog who took a stupid risk. He was a thorough reporter who covered as many bases as he could before taking that meeting. Blind hatred did him in, but it didn’t break him.

Jolie lets us understand Mariane, and Winterbottom’s film puts the viewer in her shoes. So she has no arc, no change that this terrible journey has caused in her. That’s not a shortcoming. The emotion of this horrible act doesn’t alter her core beliefs. If neither she nor Danny “let the terrorists win” by being terrorized by cowardly thugs, why should we?