Rosewater

Rosewater is the first feature film written and directed by Daily Show host and producer Jon Stewart. It tells the true story of Maziar Bahari, a London-based Iranian-Canadian journalist who was one of many people arrested and detained in Iran after that country’s controversial 2009 presidential election. Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Loneliest Planet) plays Bahari, who returns to Tehran to cover the election and visit his aging mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo of House of Sand and Fog, The Stoning of Soraya M., and The Odd Life of Timothy Green).  While back in Iran, Bahari witnesses massive support for the reformist candidate, and the angry protests of voters when the suspect election is declared a landslide victory for incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After filming an especially brutal crackdown by the reining regime against the protesters, Bahari is imprisoned in solitary confinement and harshly interrogated for four months.  Kim Bodnia (Pusher, In China They Eat Dogs, Love Is All You Need) plays the principle interrogator, whom the mostly blindfolded Bahari nicknames "Rosewater" because of the man’s distinctive fragrance.

A satirical interview Bahari gave on The Daily Show just before the election serves as one of many reasons the ruling régime suspects him of spying for the West. Stewart recreates the interview with the actual Daily Show correspondent who conducted it (Jason Jones) without exaggerating its significance in Bahari’s predicament. The fake-news TV appearance is just one example of the many, equally absurd, accusations the rather clueless and paranoid interrogators make against Bahari. Stewart shows restraint in telling this story, rarely straying from a serious, unadorned recounting of events. But rather than being a boon to the film, this unembellished approach is what dooms the picture to forgettable mediocrity.

There have been so many films based on real life accounts of wrongful political imprisonment and torture that it’s understandably difficult to find a fresh angle. These movies usually depict much harsher treatment than what Bahari suffered. I don’t mean to minimize his ordeal, but its difficult not to compare it to the more extreme situations depicted in films ranging from Alan Parker’s Oscar winning Midnight Express (1978) to the previous year’s The Railway Man (2013)--not to mention documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). Rosewater attempts to contextualize Bahari’s 118 days of solitary confinement by depicting imagined conversations between him and his late father, and flashbacks to actual conversations with his late sister. Both of these family members were imprisoned under different Iranian regimes and endured horrific prison experiences. These scenes that envision characters whose trauma lasted for years rather than days should be the most powerful aspects of the film. Yet they seem as curiously limp and bloodless.  Rosewater fails to create an emotional connection between its main character and the audience; so we watch it from a removed, painless distance.

I haven’t read Bahari’s book, but I remember when his story was in the news and he made frequent TV and radio appearances. What immediately strikes you about the real person is how dynamic and funny he is. By all accounts, these vibrant, sharp, witty qualities have always been part of his persona, but you would never guess that from the way Stewart and Bernal portray him. The Bahari we see in Rosewater is a bland, timid, indecisive dullard. Why Stewart would want to reduce the passionate, enterprising real-life individual into such a passive protagonist is mindboggling. Movies are supposed to play up their character’s engaging characteristics not minimize them. Perhaps Stewart is trying to make the fictional Bahari more relatable to the average viewer by casting him as an innocent everyman whose primary concern is just getting back to his pregnant wife in London. Or maybe he thinks painting Bahari as unaggressive and unformed at the beginning gives the film a more dramatic character arc. But generic everymen are never as interesting as charismatic muckrakers, and the character arc in Rosewater is still practically non-existent. The fictional Bahari goes from cautious, pro-Western journalist to less cautious, pro-Western activist (at least we’re told at the end that this is what he becomes--we never actually see a transformation).

Rosewater presents a story ripe for unique and powerful absurdist humor in its depiction of how the Iranian régime misinterprets Western culture and operates so far behind the times. In more experienced directorial hands, this perspective could be equal parts hilarious, terrifying, and insightful.  But Stewart, perhaps trying to avoid upstaging the story with his political satirist tendencies, eschews all opportunities for black comedy or critical farce.  Since the picture fails to completely draw us into its main character’s internal life, the experience of watching the movie feels academic rather than emotional. And when a cinematic dramatization of a true story doesn’t engage on a visceral level, it makes you wish you were reading the presumably more in-depth, detailed, and factually accurate book instead.