Rosewater (2014)

Film: Rosewater (2014)
Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Kim Bodnia, Dimitri Leonidas, Haluk Bilginer, Arian Moayed
Director: Jon Stewart
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I love The Daily Show.  It has been a part of my nightly routine since I was in college, and like most Millennials, I have a not-so-secret love and appreciation for Jon Stewart.  Stewart taught me in my most formidable years to question the validity of "what is news," question the ridiculousness of political pragmatism and campaign slogans, and point blank to have an opinion on all things.  Occasionally this causes some members of my generation to have horribly jaded views on modern issues and what it would take to actually accomplish anything, but that's really not on Stewart, who generally has a pretty progressive view of the future if people got their heads out of their butts.

This unique point-of-view is something that I was deeply eager to see explored with Stewart making his debut as a director.  The subject matter couldn't be more perfect for the culturally aware Daily Show host-the imprisonment of Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, who right before he was imprisoned made an appearance on Stewart's program that was partially used against him while he was detained as "evidence" that he was a journalistic spy, even though it was part of a comedic bit with correspondent Jason Jones.  Unfortunately, Stewart's views and famously private persona inhibit an intellectually engaging film, and instead we get a bland film with an important subject matter, but never an interesting motion picture.

(Real life doesn't have spoilers, but here's your alert anyway) The film is essentially split into two halves-the days leading up to Bahari's (Garcia Bernal) arrest/the protested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the actual imprisonment of Maziar Bahari, and what took place during his time in the cell.  The film is considerably better in the first half, when Stewart seems to be at his most willing to expand on his view of the movie.  The film follows Bahari, a journalist originally from Iran but who has moved into western culture, and has long been a fan of western culture (you see this in an interrogation sequence where his adoration for The Sopranos and Leonard Cohen are brought into question), through the streets of Tehran, interviewing both the Ahmadinejad and the Mousavi supporters, and then filming the violence that ensued upon the allegedly fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in a landslide.  The second half of the film continues to watch sporadically as the world reacts to the elections and to the eventual imprisonment of Bahari, but principally is focused on the torture endured by Bahari as he is held as a captive by the Iranian government for being a spy, despite common sense and all evidence pointing to him simply being a journalist.

The first half of the film is more successful because Stewart occasionally wants to try to make a statement about the power of modern media in affecting change.  Stewart frequently champions the way that information can spread so rapidly and lambasts organizations like CNN for not taking advantage of their perch to affect change.  You see this in the odd but very real "trending Twitter" scene where a sea of hashtags are placed in front of different random people, showing how much the world can actually affect change for the better through something like Twitter.  It's a little bit cheesy in the context of the rest of the film, but at least it's a discerning factor in a movie that is desperate to try to escape a traditional narrative structure.

The bulk of the film fails for a couple of reasons, and I'm sorry, but I have to put those principally at the hands of the writer-director-producer.  For starters, the director is clearly too close to the subject of the movie-Stewart probably felt an intense amount of guilt surrounding Bahari's imprisonment, particularly since his show was used as part of the reason to keep him in prison, and as a result, he creates characters that are far too black-and-white.  Bahari is portrayed as a saint, someone who is largely untouchable and above all criticism in the film.  This may be true in the context of the imprisonment (it's clear to any objective viewer who the villain is in this context), but it makes for a boring performance from Gael Garcia Bernal, who can create really nuanced characters when given a screenplay that allows it (look at Bad Education, for example).  When you create a saint as a main character, it limits the scope of what you're trying to accomplish as a filmmaker.

Secondly, Stewart ignores what is easily the most interesting aspect of the movie: his personal involvement.  While Bahari is the villain here, documentaries and other films like Argo have shown us countless examples of people held prisoner by a foreign government, and if the only goal of this film is to reach an audience that Stewart believes should care about journalistic prisoners, he can do that every night with a much wider reach on The Daily Show.  No, he picked this story in particular because of his personal involvement with Bahari, but Stewart, incredibly guarded about his private life, never once turns the camera on himself.  The movie would have been far more interesting if we'd followed the reactions of people like Stewart and Jason Jones in the wake of one of their comedy-bits having a real-life consequence.  ANY other filmmaker tackling this story would have included that portion of the story, if only because it's the principle reason why so many of us have actually heard of Maziar Bahari, and is likely the reason that eventually Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke publicly about Mr. Bahari and his case.  The fact that Stewart didn't consider himself enough of a character to include makes me question how honest he's being about his vision as a filmmaker, and was something that I couldn't get over in the movie.

Those are my thoughts on what is a pretty disappointing directorial debut from a man who is likely to abandon his post as one of the most important voices on television to make films that, if this is any indication, won't be very good-what are yours?  Did anyone actually like Rosewater?  Did you like it, but clearly could tell it would have been better with a little more shading?  Sound off in the comments!