Stewart's 'Rosewater' flows with suprising humor
Compared to how U.S. interrogators tortured prisoners in Kathryn Bigelow's fact-based military drama "Zero Dark Thirty," the Iranian prison housing Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari for 118 days in 2009 seems more like a country club.
Sure, Bahari has his head pressed into walls and tables a few times. Gets pummeled by feet and fists occasionally. Blindfolded, he hears the sound of a pistol being cocked and placed to his head.
Yet, Jon Stewart's serviceable feature directorial debut "Rosewater" refuses to amp up the violence and demonize the Iranian captors as most Hollywood features would demand. (Remember Marquette University student Billy Hayes violently killing his sadistically twisted Turkish prison warden in "Midnight Express"? Never happened.)
Stewart, the popular host of Comedy Central's hit series "The Daily Show, shows real promise here as a budding film writer and director with a smart, clear vision, even though "Rosewater" comes off as a relatively tepid tale based on Bahari's book "Then They Came For Me."
"Rosewater" begins with one of my least favorite narrative crutches. I call it the "jumping into the middle of a story, then flashing back to a short time before to explain how we got to the middle of the story we just jumped into" device.
Bahari (wonderfully underplayed by Gael Garcia Bernal) gets roused from his bed by his concerned mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo, blessed with one of moviedom's greatest voices). Iranian security whisks him away to jail for interrogation as a spy.
The journalist denies the charge. He has come to Tehran to cover the presidential election between conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the moderate hopeful Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
The tough-looking interrogator (Kim Bodnia, star of "The Bridge" and "Pusher") insists Bahari is spy.
For proof, he pulls up a clip of the journalist being interviewed on "The Daily Show" in which Bahari plays along with guest interviewer Jason Jones that he's a spy for the U.S. (Yes, the real Bahari made two "Daily Show" appearances. Coincidence?)
When we get whisked back in time more than a week earlier, we discover that Bahari's wife Paola (Claire Foy) has recently become pregnant with their first baby. We also find out that the Ayatollah Khomeini imprisoned Bahari's late father and sister for being communists.
Once we return to where we started, "Rosewater" takes us through Bahari's physical, emotional and spiritual test in solitary confinement as the calendar ticks off the days.
There's a surprising amount of humor in this fact-based drama. The interrogator (dubbed "Rosewater" by Bahari) pulls up the journalist's DVDs and magazines with the same query: "Porn?"
Later in his captivity, Bahari regales Rosewater with stories of lewd, sexual massages back in the morally corrupt U.S. The interrogator sits in fixed fascination, never suspecting the tales to be fantasies.
Instead of the pure evil prison official we expect, Rosewater comes off as a regular doofus, just an Iranian guy doing the best he can to break this spy, even though he doesn't know how, and doesn't really want to do it in the first place.
But he has a boss to answer to, so Rosewater bumbles his way through day after day after day of halfhearted tortures to justify his existence.
At some point in "Rosewater," I began to wonder if Stewart should have taken cue from Stanley Kubrick, who was about to direct "Dr. Strangelove" as a straight Cold War drama, until he realized the subject matter would play much better as a hilarious black comedy.
If you look at it like that, "Rosewater" is halfway there already.
“Rosewater”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Halah Bilginer, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Golshifteh Farahani
Directed by: Jon Stewart
Other: An Open Roads Films release. Rated R for language, violence. 103 minutes