Of course, no one should have anything but the deepest sympathy for the family of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and gruesomely murdered in Pakistan five years ago and who is now the subject of Michael Winterbottom’s fine new film, “A Mighty Heart.”

Yet I hope they and others will forgive me for asking the perhaps indelicate question of why it is that, of all the Americans who have been killed by Islamist terrorism, Pearl is the only individual (so far) about whose life and death a movie has been made?

Well, the media celebrates its own. There is a special poignancy in the death of a reporter that sets it apart from the deaths of soldiers or other kinds of civilians because the mythology of the contemporary media culture insists on placing the journalist above the battle. The function of the journalist is that he doesn’t take sides, so it seems particularly unfair when one side insists on treating him like an enemy combatant.

This isn’t to say that Pearls’ is not a powerful story, or that it is not powerfully told in “A Mighty Heart.” Mr. Winterbottom very cleverly tells it so much from the point of view of the murdered man’s widow, Mariane (Angelina Jolie), that we know almost no more of what happens to him, or when it happens, than she does.

Mariane glimpses “Danny” (Dan Futterman) for the final time as he gets into a taxi outside their home in Karachi. We follow him a little further — until the taxi drops him at a restaurant somewhere in the vast, sprawling Pakistani city where he was to have met a source for a story he was doing on the shoe-bomber, Richard Reid.

But the source isn’t there, and the camera leaves him as he wonders whether to wait or to go back home, aware, as are we, of his vulnerability, all alone in this strange place. We are not shown the kidnapping, nor anything more of his captivity than Mariane learns from a videotape sent by the kidnappers. Nor, it must go without saying, are we shown his murder.

We may be tempted to wonder what the point is of such reticence, since the audience will already know — as in the film, of course, Mariane doesn’t — what is happening, but it makes good cinematic sense. By not attempting to imagine what he (and Mariane) does not know, Mr. Winterbottom forces our imaginations to run wild in a way not entirely dissimilar, I imagine, from the way the imaginations of the victim’s loved ones do.

This helps give us a powerful sense of empathy with Ms. Pearl as she is whisked back and forth between the desperate search for Danny in the present and flashbacks to the happy scenes of their courtship and marriage that naturally increase the poignancy, and thus the sense of urgency, of the search.

In one such tender scene, just before his kidnapping on the eve of what was to have been their departure from Pakistan, Danny fondles Mariane’s pregnant belly and says, “Amazing how you can love someone you never met.”

It’s not so amazing that the film also makes us care about the Pearls. And, though Danny Pearl doesn’t have quite the innocence of a babe in the womb, we may begin to think he does. He certainly has something of its helplessness and, therefore, the same ability to inspire solicitude.

Yet as I suggested at the outset, there is a political dimension to his journalistic innocence that it may seem somewhat lacking in delicacy to point out. There are, in the film, implied criticisms of the Wall Street Journal for sharing information on matters of national security with the CIA because it increased the danger to Danny. The kidnappers may thus have seen themselves as vindicated in their belief that he was an agent of the CIA — or of Mossad.

Not that we should care any less about what happened to Danny were he such an agent, but it’s his not being one that creates the kick of indignation and pathos that gets a film like “A Mighty Heart” made.

It makes sense for Mariane to resent anything that increases the danger to her husband, but those of us watching a cinematic re-creation have less of an excuse for objecting to a blurring of the line between the determined neutrality of the journalist and the unwilling engagement in the war on terror of his fellow countrymen.

For it seems that that neutrality is not a real option. To be a journalist devoted to free inquiry, as to be an American devoted to other sorts of civic freedoms, is already to be enlisted in the war against those who would destroy those freedoms. It would better serve Daniel Pearl’s memory to admit that his sad fate has made this clear.