Review: Rosewater
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
To borrow a frequent Daily Show quip, Jon Stewart’s directorial debut is “a nice movie for the nice people” — honorable, unobjectionable and a trifle dull.
THE DULL-Y SHOW: Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, about jailed Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal), is honorable, unobjectionable and, unfortunately, kind of boring.
City Paper guide: B
To borrow a frequent Daily Show quip, Jon Stewart’s directorial debut is “a nice movie for the nice people” — honorable, unobjectionable and a trifle dull. The story of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was accused of espionage and tortured for three months in a Tehran jail, Rosewater — named for the scent of his interrogator’s aftershave — features solid performances, although casting Mexican Gael García Ber-nal as Bahari and Danish Kim Bodnia as his tormentor raises issues the movie isn’t equipped to deal with. Stewart, of course, has a thoughtful answer ready for interviewers, but it’s not the same thing. Between them, García Bernal and Bodnia play out their pas de deux as a kind of violent farce.
Rosewater, as the interrogator is identified in the credits, is suspicious and small-minded, lacking both world-liness and a sense of humor. (The ostensible reason for Bahari’s jailing was an interview with The Daily Show’s Jason Jones, who mock-accused him of being a spy.) Bahari, for his part, can be smug and high-handed, seizing opportunities to mock his captor’s inadequacies with quips that sometimes don’t fly quite far enough above his head. It’s not exactly Grand Illusion, but Stewart’s script, drawn from Bahari and Aimee Molloy’s Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival, does follow Rosewater outside Bahari’s line of sight, showing how his brutality flows downhill from his superior’s threats.
But the movie’s not out to challenge perceptions or realign allegiances: The bad guys and the good guy(s) are exactly who you think they’ll be. For a movie about extended captivity, Rosewater is, if anything, too pleasant to watch. It depicts Bahari’s fear without conveying it, letting viewers keep a comfy distance while tut-tutting foreign totalitarianism. It’s not wrong, but it’s easy.
