During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges earlier that year, Jon Stewart said, "We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil." Or about its total humorlessness. Bahari was arrested the previous June partly as the result of a Daily Show segment: Jason Jones, posing as the most phony-baloney spy imaginable, interviewed Bahari in Tehran just before an explosive election. Why was Iran so evil? Jones demanded. The perfect straight man, Bahari gave a response that was deflective, sensitive and articulate. But Iranian authorities arrested him shortly after the election, four days after the episode aired, using the Daily Show appearance as proof that Bahari himself was a spy.
So Stewart has made a movie — his debut as a director — based on Bahari's experience. Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice — there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features. At the beginning, Gael García Bernal's Bahari leaves his London home and his pregnant wife for what he thinks will be a routine visit to his hometown, Tehran, to cover the election for Newsweek. He hires a hip young driver, Davood (Dimitri Leonidas), who doesn't actually have a car — just a shaky little motorbike. But Davood knows all the right people, and through him, Bahari meets a group of idealistic young men who have educated themselves by tapping forbidden TV channels via a wholly illegal garden of satellite dishes perched on a rooftop. These guys make it clear they'll be casting their vote for Mousavi, the challenger to the controversial, bellicose incumbent Ahmadinejad. To them, and to Bahari, it seems perfectly plausible, if not likely, that Mousavi could win a democratic election — provided the election in question is going to be at all democratic.
Meanwhile, Bahari meets with Jones (playing himself) and gives what he assumes is a harmless interview — between takes, he cracks up at the obviousness of Jones's spy shtick. A few days later, it's not so funny: The election results spark violence, some of which Bahari captures on camera. He assumes that's the reason he's picked up by government goons, as his mother, played with gravity by Shohreh Aghdashloo, anxiously looks on. No wonder she's worried: Both Bahari's father and sister spent time in prison, during the eras of the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini, respectively. Still, Bahari can't believe he'll be held for long, until he realizes that his interrogator, a man known to him only as Rosewater (played by Kim Bodnia), genuinely believes that Newsweek is a spy organization. His refusal to cooperate — because how, exactly, is he supposed to respond? — lands him in solitary confinement. At one point, he's led to believe he's going to be killed.
We all know Stewart is a smart guy who's good at talking. What's surprising is how good he is at filmmaking. Stewart — who adapted the script from Bahari's 2011 book, Then They Came for Me — understands that even a story relying largely on dialogue also needs to be cinematic.
Bernal gives a delicately calibrated performance, and he's funny, too: At the movie's high point, Bahari outwits his interrogator in a way that's pure comedy, so outlandish that you can't believe it could actually work. But then, Bahari's captors, blindly devoted to the religious supremacy of the state, aren't terribly good at thinking for themselves. And it's in setting the movie's tone, layer by layer, that Stewart proves most adept.
