Review of Rosewater (2014) by Aubrey J — 17 Nov 2014

Would we care that much about this film if Jon Stewart - he of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" - were not the director? I doubt it (and I'm a fan of Stewart's). While it tells a worthy story - how Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was imprisoned for 118 days in 2009 by the Iranian regime after he reported on the disputed 2009 presidential election between then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the main opposition leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, it does not tell it in any particularly exciting way. This is a film by a first-time director, so to expect more would be unrealistic. Still, Stewart does not embarrass himself, and gets a fine performance out of Mexican actor Gael García Bernal ("Y tu mamá también"), who plays Bahari. But the script (which Stewart wrote, based on Bahari's memoir "Then They Came for Me") and the direction almost succeed in making a compelling story seem pedestrian (starting with the horrible music by Howard Shore, who has done much better work in films like "Doubt" and "The Departed," among many others). Stewart felt driven to make this film in part because Bahari had appeared on his show a few days before being arrested, an appearance which was one of the pieces of evidence used against him during his incarceration (dictators never seem to have a sense of humor, sadly). Nevertheless, it would have been better to have a Paul Greengrass ("United 93") or an Alan Parker ("Midnight Express") direct it. Oh, well.

What we get is a film that purports to show us a horrible ordeal at the hands of a totalitarian regime that manages to make said ordeal seem like no big deal. There is very little tension anywhere, although both Bernal and his interrogator, "Rosewater" (so nicknamed by Bahari - though we never learn this from the movie - because of the scent he applied to himself daily) - played by Danish actor Kim Bodnia ("In a Better World") - do their best. There is one moment in the film where the story suddenly takes a turn for the captivating, and that is when the über-interragotor who supervises "Rosewater" challenges Bahari to prove - given the history of the Western media and of the CIA in Iran (he argues that both conspired to turn public opinion against the regime of Mohammad Mosaddeq and supported his ouster in favor of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi) - that he is not a spy. "How can you say that when the media worked with the CIA to bring the Shah to power?" It's true - the CIA did usher in the Shah. In the ongoing Kafkaesque negotiations between Bahari and his torturers, where words matter less than subjugation, this scene proves interesting. The rest is just noise (which may be Stewart's point, but which does not make for captivating cinema). Good try, Jon. You got this out of your system. I'll wait for your next movie.