Toronto Review: Jon Stewart’s Rosewater (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

Comedian Jon Stewart directs a drama about a journalist who was imprisoned in Iran after he appeared on The Daily Show. Critic Owen Gleiberman delivers a verdict.

Rosewater, a true-life prison drama set in Iran, is one of the most incisive movies about the post-9/11 world ever made. That's not because Jon Stewart, in his directorial debut, does anything epic or extravagant. Quite the contrary: in every scene, he keeps the focus intimate. As a filmmaker, the quipster-newsman of The Daily Show turns out to be a '70s classicist, deadly sincere not just about his subject but about doing everything possible to capture the full, revealing truth of it on screen. Stewart works with astounding confidence and skill; he's a born storyteller with a gift for sculpting drama out of the smallest actions. In Rosewater, he takes the story of Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-Canadian journalist who was incarcerated by the Iranian government in 2009, and instead of pumping up the events (or inflating Bahari's heroism), he mostly lets the drama speak for itself.

Bahari, played with fervour and a kind of elegant modesty by Gael García Bernal, was a 40-something journalist with a pregnant wife in London when he was dispatched by Newsweek magazine to cover 2009’s Iranian presidential election, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faced reformist challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi. When Bahari arrives in Tehran, he interviews a young supporter of the regime and when he raises the possibility of election fraud, the anger that suddenly clouds the face of this zealot is absolute. In his mind, even posing such a question can only be propaganda. Then Bahari talks to a pack of young reformers, who have loaded the roof of their headquarters with what looks like a lollipop garden of illegal satellite dishes – they call it ’dish university’. This is what the election is really about: letting the outside world in.

Personal is political

Stewart, who shot Rosewater in Jordan, lets a romantic surge of idealism build as it looks like Mousavi might win, but then out of nowhere, these hopes are dashed. Ahmadinejad is declared the winner by a landslide, and protesters take to the streets. Though the film uses a lot of actual news footage, you never feel like it's blending reality and staged scenes; that's how seamlessly woven it is. When Bahari finds himself next to a surge of protesters and soldiers begin to fire into the crowd, picking off demonstrators, Bahari has a choice: should he film the massacre? If he does, he might be in trouble. But his instinct makes him turn on the camera.
***
more: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140909-review-jon-stewarts-rosewater




(I think he liked it. )

[frazzled]

1. Also a great Variety review (with video)

(Okay, and it apparently has an extended sequence using one of my favorite songs: Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Time.&quot

http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-rosewater-1201291126/