Review: Rosewater
Monday, November 17, 2014 at 9:45AM 
Michael C. with your weekly new release review...
A key part of Jon Stewart’s appeal is that no matter how maddening the news is he doesn’t lapse into ironic detachment. His isn’t someone throwing up his hands in surrender, but the guy who can’t help but marvel at the variety of ways government finds to sabotage our best intentions and allow stupidity to win out over rationality. So it should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Stewart that Rosewater, his directorial debut, is marked by the same earnest intellectual curiosity.
As director and screenwriter Stewart brings a sly complexity to material that could have been one note or overwrought in other hands. His trademark wit is not absent from the film but it has been restrained and left to simmer under the surface as Maziar Bahari’s months long imprisonment and torture at the hands of Iranian government steadily edges into the realm of absurdity. “Why would a spy have his own TV show?” Bahari protests when his interrogator presents a Daily Show appearance during which he is jokingly referred to as a spy as evidence. It’s a moment of indisputable logic that gets him nowhere, oppressive regimes not being famous for their sense of humor.
Of course, Bahari’s arrest, torture, and solitary confinement for over 100 days was not simply the matter of a joke gone awry. [More...]
It was a consequence of his being too friendly to the West and for bearing witness to the violence the regime used to suppress the outcry when it appeared that the 2009 election had been brazenly stolen. It’s vague how seriously his persecutors take the spy silliness, but there is no mistaking how angered they are by Bahiri’s next statement in that Daily Show segment, that the peoples of Iran and the United States have much in common.
As a filmmaker, Stewart errs on the side of modesty. The bulk of Rosewater boils down to a two-hander between Bahari and his tormentor, nicknamed Rosewater by Bahari because of the scent he wears. Stewart doesn’t juice up the battle of wills between the two men with “look at me” cinematic steroids, opting for an unadorned docudrama approach that emphasizes clarity over showmanship. Nobody is going to mistake Stewart for the next Aronofsky but what he does is effective, mining the central dynamic for an impressive amount of shadings. Stewart does display a first-timer’s weakness for double underlining important beats - most of the handholding voice over could be done away with - but for the most part Rosewater has a directness that is absorbing, if not shattering.
One of many smart choices Stewart makes is not to dwell on the physical abuse, focusing instead on the battle for the mental supremacy between Bahari and his persecutors. If Stewart’s goal were to show the brutality endured by political detainees, Bahari would be a poor choice of protagonist what with his atypically high profile and powerful connections. But Stewart is not making that film. He is making a film about the futility of government attempts to control thought and how the flow of information can no longer be contained, or even quarantined from a man in solitary confinement, and for this he found the perfect subject.
“This is all theater,” Bahari’s father tells him when he summons the memory of his father, himself a political prisoner, to offer him counsel in one of the film’s few subjective flourishes. Rosewater pivots on Bahari choice to reject the mythos of power his jailers have constructed around themselves, and recognize Rosewater for what he is: a put upon working man, getting pressure from all sides in the pursuit of staged confessions everyone knows are meaningless. Gael Garcia Bernal is predictably strong as Bahiri but there isn’t much of a dramatic arc to his straightforward endurance trial. It’s Rosewater, his interrogator, played in a performance of finely drawn layers by Kim Bodnia, who stays with us when the film is over. When Rosewater clashes with the orders from above he suppresses his own capacity for independent thought more successfully than he ever controls Bahari’s. There is no more feared figure than the anti-western Islamic fanatic and Stewart’s brings him down to life-sized, even pitiful dimensions.
Rosewater is understandably being sold on The Daily Show brand but those expecting the movie to be a similar intellectual grenade launcher will be left wanting. Rosewater is thought provoking but in a low-key, finely tuned way. It brings humanity to a part of the world most often seen as a caricature by American audiences, and in pure popcorn entertainment terms there is a genuine thrill to watching Bahari, stripped of everything but his own intellect, shift the balance of power in his favor. The moment when Bernal dances around his cell to a mental recording of Leonard Cohen’s "Dance Me To The End of Love" is one of the deep down satisfying scenes I’ve seen this year.
Grade: B
Oscar Chances: Probably too small to catch Oscar's eye, even with Stewart's profile to boost it, but I wouldn't be shocked if it popped up in adapted screenplay if the fourth and fifth slot remain up for grabs. And if voters are having a hard time filling up Supporting Actor they could do a lot worse than Kim Bodnia... not that I actually think this will happen.
Reader Comments (4)
Honestly, I'm a little surprised by this review. But maybe this movie just wasn't up my alley. I thought the drama was WAY too understated, to the point where I didn't feel like there was much of anything at stake. The middle act dragged a bit, and therefore there wasn't really much of a third-act payoff. You're right to show that the best parts were regarding how silly the captors were. And yes, that dancing scene was great. But the drama was too low, and it all seemed un-cinematic. The human element wasn't there, although the political parts were interesting. But it just was not nearly hard-hitting enough as it could've been. As outraged that Jon Stewart gets about this stuff, I'm surprised that this was this vanilla.
I'm afraid Rosewater was a classic "neither here nor there" movie for me. It's not funny or sharp elbowed enough to be a satire. It's not intense or rigorous enough to be a drama. It's just a muddled, well intentioned human interest piece directly from the George Clooney school, where our liberal righteous indignation is supposed to do the heavy lifting that Stewart's filmmaking does not. This is a movie for middle aged Upper West Side audiences (and their out of state equivalents) tocluck at and go for a coffee afterwards and talk about for five minutes before planning dinner.
Bernal dancing was adorable, though, I'll give you that.
Roark - I don't see how Rosewater coasts on liberal indignation. Unless it's now a left/right issue that journalists should not be jailed and tortured for doing their job, which, if true, would be depressing.
I meant to take out "liberal" and just leave it as righteous indignation, actually. oops. i'm sure there's conservative righteous indignation on the subject too. though i think my point was not so much about the absence of conservative outrage, and more to do with Rosewater being designed to appeal more or less exclusively to Stewart's liberal audience. which is fine, but when paired by (IMO) lazy filmmaking, it's problematic.