Director: Jon Stewart
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Kim Bodina, Dimitri Leonidas, Haluk Bilginer, Shohreh Aghdasloo, Golshifteh Farahani, Claire Foy
Rating: B-
In 2013 Jon Stewart, the beloved host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, took a break from the world of Satire and traveled to Jordan to make his debut into the film world. Stewart’s film, Rosewater, is based on the book “Then They Came for Me”, written by journalist Maziar Bahari about the 118 days he spent in an Iranian prison. The movie is a heartfelt attempt at bringing to light the turmoil in Iran during its 2009 elections and the plight of journalists that succumb to the oppression of foreign governments. Sadly, torture, wrongful imprisonment, and violation of human rights still exists in many parts of the world. Rosewater is an earnest endeavor to bring to light the injustice that journalists often fall prey to when covering events in countries that don’t seem to idealize individual freedom.
Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal), on assignment with Newsweek magazine, goes to Iran during the 2009 elections to report on the controversial presidential election taking place in that nation. On his arrival in Tehran, Maziar befriends Davood, a sassy smart taxi driver, who he hires to show him around the city and help gather information on the Iranian reaction to the presidential race between two explosive candidates. He meets several young men who have formed the “Dish University”. The college age boys have found a way to get information in and out of the country by hiding dish satellites on the roof of a house where the equipment will not be detected. The London-based journalist has the privilege of seeing people peacefully demonstrating in the streets and he is charged with excitement at the possibility of change in his homeland by the movement of its citizens. But soon that excitement turns to fear as Maziar witnesses people being beaten, dragged, and even shot when protesters cry out that the election was rigged after the landslide victory of the current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Newsweek correspondent captures the outrage over the elections on film with the intent of reporting what he has witnessed back to the western world.
Iranian officials get wind of Maziar’s attempts to share what he has observed with the west and are not too happy about the his story getting out. The officials, who raid Mazair’s childhood home, confiscate his personal belongings, his camera, his laptop, and anything else that they can twist into meaning that Mazair has no good intentions towards his home country. His mother Moloojoon (Shahreh Aghdasloo) is helpless to do anything as she watches her soon being hauled off in handcuffs.
What takes place is a 118 day ordeal in Evin Prison where Maziar is repeatedly questioned about being a spy. Blind folded during the interrogations, Maziar never sees his interrogator and only knows him as Rosewater (Kim Bodina) because of the scent he always carries. Rosewater’s goal is to get the news man to confess to crimes of spying and denounce the western world for trying to manipulate the Iranian people with false propaganda. At first Maziar defies his abductors and refuses to give in but days go by, and much to the delight of Rosewater and his superiors, Maziar starts to break. The reporter simply wants to get back home to his pregnant wife and resume his life. Finally, Maziar agrees to sign a confession and go on national TV admitting to manipulating his report on events during the Iranian election. His hope is that if he complies his jailers will let him go. Instead, those keeping him under lock and key find more reasons to keep the now emotionally destroyed prisoner in solitary confinement. Maziar Bahari is left believing that he is forgotten and will die in Evin prison.
Rosewater is held together by the relationship between Maziar and Rosewater as both try to outsmart each other. There is an engaging scene in which Maziar figures out how to hold his guard’s attention by making up stories about illicit sex in massage parlors. Captivated by stories of something he has never experienced, Rosewater gets distracted from his task of breaking the will of his prisoner. Maziar outwitting Rosewater does provide a bit of humor in the film.
This film really is the story of Maziar and others like him that often are persecuted just for being a witness to real events. Bernal gives a strong and haunting performance as the wrongly imprisoned inmate. The audience can feel the despair of Bernal’s character as he slowly starts to lose hope. Much of the film is spent on Bernal alone in a cell with nothing to do but have imagined conversations with his deceased father and sister to hold his sanity together. Some of the best dialogue in the film comes from the hallucinations as the prisoner tries to reason out what is happening to him and what course of action he should take to save his life.
Some will probably wonder why the filmmakers choose to have all of the Iranian characters talking in accented English vs. Persian. The fact that the native tongue of Iran was not used along with subtitles somehow made the film seem less authentic. To make the point that there was a public outcry over Maziar’s incarceration, several news images and twitter feeds are flashed across the screen that actually became very distracting and more like a campaign for social media. In the beginning of the film there is a puzzling montage of images flashed on buildings as Maziar walks through the streets of London that are supposed to fill us in on the history of his family. It so happens that his father and sister were jailed by past Iranian regimes. This is just another distracting annoyance and the filmmakers could have easily incorporated the jailing of Maziar’s father and sister into the film without wasting screen time.
There are points in the movie that seem off as Jon Stewart tries to incorporate satire to show how absurd Iranian policy is towards democracy, but it is never really explored why or how the country got that way. So to poke fun at something without really knowing its history made Rosewater lose some of its punch.
In the end the film does accomplish the goal of telling the audience that journalists are often the target “for the crime of bearing witness” and that there are many people around the world living in oppression. Rosewater is also a look at human endurance, hope, and perseverance under the worst of circumstances. Not a bad attempt for Jon Stewart’s first film and one has to commend him for bringing to light the injustice of denying basic freedoms to people around the world.
