Rosewater (4/5 Stars)

The hook of this story was all so irresistible. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the many award winning fake news show on Comedy Central, sent a correspondent named Jason Jones to Iran on the even of the 2009 Iranian elections. While there he interviewed a British-Iranian journalist named Maziar Bahari who tried to convince Jason, comedically dressed as a spy, that Iranians were not evil and that Americans and Iranians had plenty in common. I remember seeing that segment in 2009. And then shit went down in Iran. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, rigged the elections and the following street protests went viral. Several months later we find out that Maziar Bahari was jailed without due process after the elections. He was accused of being a spy and provoking civil disorder through the Western media. What was some of the evidence against him? Well, the Daily Show segment that showed him talking to Jason Jones dressed up as a spy. Maziar wrote a book about it titled, “Then They Came for Me.” Jon Stewart offered to help to make it a movie, tried to get other people to do it, and then after finding that people in Hollywood were busy, decided to just write and direct it himself. After almost thirty years in the business, this is Stewart’s directorial debut.

But of course Jon Stewart has enough sense to know this story is not about The Daily Show. That may be the hook and Jason Jones does show up to play himself for about a minute, but this is a story about Maziar Bahari and Iran. The Daily Show’s importance to this story is not exaggerated. It may even be diminished by Stewart’s ever-humble view of his show’s popularity and influence. He is as ever the opposite of the arrogant self-important culture warrior of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a very interesting movie; avant-garde is almost a perfect word for it. I hesitate to use that word because you probably are going to start thinking of black and white French movies, but let me explain. It has a very simple photographic style. The palette of the movie is not unlike a Paul Greengrass movie (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Bourne Ultimatum) so it has a true documentary style feel to its movement and an almost non-existent directorial style. The acting also is simple and direct. Lastly the production value does not add anything more than what you would see in real life. But at the same time it makes rather extraordinary choices in digital effects. For instance, during the 2009 election demonstrations, the movie employs digital twitter art to show that the streets are alive with social media. At another time as Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) walks down the street, the storefront windows start showing memories from his past concurrently with an explanatory voiceover. These are odd show-offy effects movements that have been seemingly dropped out of the sky in what is otherwise a very non show-offy movie. The same goes for the editing style of the movie, which freely employs flashbacks and jump cuts. I’m not saying it did not work because I don’t think they were too disruptive to the tone but they were at least a little. Then again, at other times the avant-garde choices really do work. For instance, in solitary confinement Maziar has several imaginary talks with his father and sister who were also imprisoned for political activism in their time. So John just goes ahead and puts real actors in the jail cell with Maziar and has them talk like they are really there. At another point he decides to play Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” in the jail cell like it is really there. That was sublime. All of this is the effect of having a person who doesn’t really know how to make movies (but really knows how to communicate with an audience in the medium) be at the helm for the first time. The decisions make sense but they also feel like they were dropped from space. This is an odd little movie.

But what ultimately makes the movie worth seeing is the humor and empathy it employs towards its subject, several months of solitary imprisonment and interrogation that borders on torture. You would not think it by looking at it but the title of the movie is a joke. It refers to the cologne that Maziar’s interrogator always wore. Apparently this middle-aged somewhat portly balding tough guy thought he should smell like a rose all the time. Little details like this fill the movie. The start itself owes a bit to Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ That is, Maziar (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) is woken from his sleep by several men including Rosewater (played by Kim Bodnia) and is taken off to prison with no warning or explanation. There is no due process of law. He gets no phone call or lawyer. They make it clear that they will not let him go unless he confesses that he acted in concert with foreign spies. Now here is where Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari make it interesting. Where a normal movie would treat the character of the interrogator as a one dimensional zeolot of Iranian ideology, this movie treats Rosewater as simply a bureaucrat who is just doing his job. In one scene we see him call his wife to let her know when he is getting home. In another he hopes for a promotion if he gets Maziar to confess. In another great scene, Rosewater’s boss comes into the room to show him how to interrogate this particular type of prisoner. Maziar, an educated professional, is a bit above Rosewater’s pay grade. He usually beats up uneducated poor people. Here Rosewater is directed to get a confession by using his head and not his fists. Maziar needs to get on TV and admit his guilty without any obvious signs of torture. Rosewater is not really up to the task and it is kind of sad actually. Especially in a couple funny scenes where Maziar takes advantage of Rosewater’s obviously repressed sexuality. This is a great performance by Kim Bodnia and I hope he is gets an Oscar nomination out of it.

At the same time though, the character of Maziar is taken out of the culture war as well. In one great scene he has a discussion with his father who was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah in the 1950s because he was a devout communist. His father does not want his son to admit guilt and to stay strong. Maziar retorts that he has a wife that is pregnant with his child. Would he deprive them of a husband and father for an ideology? Wasn’t his father’s imprisonment and torture based on the Soviet system of imprisonment and torture? What loyalty does Maziar have to any ideology when almost all of them are headed by total assholes that imprison and torture people? This is a sentiment I’m sure bares influence from Jon Stewart whose show on Comedy Central is guided by the strong insight that although the national dialogue may be controlled by the yelling and shouting of unnecessarily provocative pundits and ideologues, the vast majority of people are preoccupied with their own lives and shit, are willing to cooperate and compromise with those they have differences with to make daily life easier, and share a general hope that the idiots in charge don’t fuck up their lives too much. And Maziar probably agrees with that too. Hey that’s another thing we may have in common with Iranians.