Rosewater

3 out of 4 Stars

Rosewater, Jon Stewart's directorial debut, is a fascinating adaptation of Maziar Bahari's memoir, "Then They Came For Me." In June of 2009, Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist for Newsweek magazine, covered the build up and aftermath of the Iranian elections in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected causing thousands of Iranians to march to the streets in protest over what was considered a rigged election; thousands were arrested by the police and several were killed during the protests. Bahari captured the atrocities on film and was arrested, tortured, and held for 118 days in Tehran's Evin prison. However, he wasn't arrested over his raw footage of the protests, but over an appearance he made on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In the televised segment, Bahari compared America to Iran despite the misconceptions that Iran was anti-American. What was supposed to be a light television interview led by Daily Show correspondent/comedian, Jason Jones, who joked that he was an American spy, led to Bahari's imprisonment. His arrest made headlines leading to thousands  of people to petition for his freedom.

Gael Garcia Bernal stars as Bahari and gives a genuine performance that balances between humor and despair; such as when he reveals fake sexual encounters to appease his arresting officer known only as Rosewater, played by Kim Bodina, or when he his talking to the ghosts of his father and sister who were both arrested during the 1953 coup in Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Bernal manages to use his solitary confinement to his advantage by having the music of Leonard Cohen and sounds of his family run through his head.    

Jon Stewart, the host of the satirical fake news program, The Daily Show, gives an ambitious directorial debut that cuts against the grain of his nightly humor and satirical analysis of current events. That being said, the film does come across as another story of false imprisonment over a conspiracy or overly-paranoid police force as seen in Jim Sheridan's In The Name of The Father or Norman Jewison's Hurricane. Stewart does manage to make the topic relevant in terms of how social media devices, like Twitter and Facebook, have overshadowed the comments of fixed-news organizations since it is the people's perspective that trumps over newspapers and television. The result, a poignant David vs. Goliath story that may have been repeated many times before, but still manages to as relevant today as when the events unfolded in Bahari's life.