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Day 249 of 365 of
my year long challengeWeek 36: Breaking News!
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Thanks to Jon Stewart of
The Daily Show fame, this film could not have happened on a whole lot of levels.
Rosewater is a solid film that desperately wants to be so much more but never quite succeeds at launching itself to this elevated position. Nevertheless, it tells a story worth telling and raises an issue worth fighting for.
Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) is an Iranian-Canadian journalist living in London working for
Newsweek. Sent to Iran to cover the 2009 elections, Bahari is detained for being a spy. For 118 days, Bahari is locked in solitary confinement, beaten and interrogated. Finally, with a great deal of outside pressure, Bahari is released.
The film makes this out to be a simple enough story and doesn't challenge itself to dig any deeper. What you see is what you get and as good as
Rosewater looks, it's all a little too clean. Where the film lacks depth and development, it makes up for it with charm and earnestness.
One can't help but feel that Stewart did this as much out of guilt as anything else. It was a segment on his show that "revealed" Bahari to be a spy and therefore was a key piece of evidence used against him. Now, that doesn't mean the film itself carries any overtones of guilt or tries to repent, but it feels self-serving for Stewart to make aware the story that he became a part of.
Move past all this, and that's about as deep as the film really gets, and you come to a film buoyed by a series of performances that are much more charming and entertaining than one would expect. Bernal shines as Bahari. He is a fantastic actor that always appears in intriguing, solid films but here he captures a lighter side of the story and its hero. He runs the gamut of emotions without flinching but it's the little moments of wit that truly endear him to you. Sadly, Dimitri Leonidas is wasted as Davood, a local who Bahari becomes friends with. He's a welcome face but he has little to really do . Kim Bodnia as "Rosewater", Bahari's specialist (i.e. interrogator) is as equally welcome but entirely more interesting. The character is a volatile, moody individual who seems like he could possibly have had more development but is left to be the image of brutality. Outside of this, everyone is a mixed bag of mostly 'meh' performances that appear so briefly it doesn't matter.
I understand the film is focussed on and belongs to Bahari but Stewart and co could have done so much more to create a more developed and interesting world with more interesting people. The broader conflict going on around this story is just as quickly overlooked once it has played its role in getting Bahari imprisoned. For a book that is constantly praised for capturing nuance, the film lacks enough to be better.
The best moments of the film though are by far Bahari's brief conversations with his father (Haluk Bilginer) and sister Maryam (Golshifteh Farahani). The sister gets only one brief moment but it is with his father that Bahari and his plight become something bigger and bolder. They may be ghosts of Bahari's imagination but they are some of the more subtle and brilliant moments. Watching Bahari essentially argue with himself over how he must best handle the situation stand out as better parts than the whole. Likewise, an early bit of narration running over the history of Iran and our lead shows glimpses of how the film could do more.
Disappointing as it may inevitably be,
Rosewater still comes across as something undeniably fascinating. The plight of journalists detained for reporting the truth is hardly new but seems ever more outrageous. Bahari is one of the lucky ones for being set free and
Rosewater does enough justice to his story to get the message out. Sadly, it doesn't do enough to stay with you for any great length of time once the credits roll.
