Rosewater (***)

You might not expect a comedian-turned-TV host, even the host of a news parody show, to make his directorial debut with a drama about an journalist arrested by the Iranian government. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show played an odd, indirect role in the story of Maziar Bahari, whose memoir was adapted by Stewart. Being an American film, it’s almost all in English, though in real life, presumably, most of the speaking would have been in Farsi.

Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a Newsweek reporter covering the 2009 elections in Iran, was arrested and accused of spying. His interrogator relied partly on an interview Bahari had given to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in which Jones had asked, in the show’s mock serious way, if Bahari were a spy. (Modestly, Stewart doesn’t refer to the show by name.)

The film depicts Bahari’s reporting on the election and, primarily, his subsequent detention and interrogation. (For the squeamish, the violence is fairly minimal.) Though Stewart briefly shows us scenes involving the interrogator and his superior, almost all of the movie is from Bahari’s point of view, understandable given that it’s based on a memoir. This means, though, that the biggest mysteries — did the Iranians truly think Bahari was a spy, what did they expect to accomplish by holding him, and so on — remain so. Instead, the film is a window into the mind of the captive, wondering what he should or can do to save himself. Stewart uses flashbacks and imagined discussions between Bahari and his late father and sister, who had also been held captive, both to depict Bahari’s backstory and to reveal his thoughts while in solitary confinement. At the time of his captivity, the Iranian-born Bahari was based in London, where his wife was pregnant with his first child.

Stewart’s debut is an entirely credible effort, well done but without that many surprises, kind of what you might expect from a film on this subject, if not from this particular writer-director.


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viewed 11/10/14 7:00 pm at AMC Loews Cherry Hill and posted 11/10/14

Argo (***1/2)

I always enjoy it when movies do more than one thing well. Ben Affleck’s third directorial effort (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is a three-for-one. In the first, shortest sequence, it is a docudrama (incorporating news footage) showing, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries taking over the American embassy. The mass hostage-taking that followed was the year’s top foreign-policy story and, perhaps, the thing that lost Jimmy Carter re-election.

The flight, in secret, of a handful of embassy employees to the nearby Canadian embassy is a lesser-known story that makes perfect fodder for an elliptical thriller, with a rescue plan that was literally straight out of Hollywood. The satirical midsection would not be ought of place in Get Shorty. John Goodman and Alan Arkin play the colorful movie folks who helped produce the operation, the details of which are too amusing to recount.

But then Affleck, who plays the CIA operative who arranges the whole plan and sells it to his agency superiors, deftly pivots again and shows the operation in action in a most suspenseful way. He pays attention to the individual hostages, who included a married couple and one man who is heavily skeptical of the plan, which requires them to play, among other things, Canadians.

The script, while not perfectly fidelitous to history, particularly in the third act, gets some points for casting, as can be seen in the photographs of the actual hostages, looking remarkably like the actors who portray them (as does the John Goodman character). The story is based on a book by Tony Mendez, Affleck’s character, with a screenplay by Chris Terrio. It’s a fine blend of Hollywood thrills and nervous tension, with a touch of comedy.

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viewed 11/4/2012 2:05 pm at Ritz 16 NJ; review posted 2/21/2013

A Separation (****)

Iran boasts a fairly robust film industry, but its only filmmakers whose movies have been widely seen outside the country are Jafar Panahi, whose politically laced work led to his arrest and a ban on further filmmaking, and Abbas Kiarostami, who makes minimalist, arty films like A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. This drama by Asghar Farhadi (whose previous work has been shown at US film festivals) is neither political or arty in an obvious way. It is both accessible enough to have been a hit in its native country and complex enough to garner a passel of awards.

The main characters in this story (Leila Hatami, Peyman Maadi) are a married, middle-class couple, but the wife is seeking a divorce. On what grounds an unseen clerk asks. Does he mistreat you? No, he is a good man, she explains, but will not emigrate with her. He does not wish to leave his elderly father, who has dementia. Neither party will budge. And so, instead of divorce, the couple separate, necessitating hiring a housekeeper who can also look after the old man. There is also a choice for the couple’s eleven-year-old, who elects, for now, to stay with her father.

The rest of the story is all complications that lead to an unfortunate incident and an accusation against the husband. What’s brilliant about the movie is the way it brings several elements together in a completely natural way. It has much to say about the push-pull of relationships, but it’s not a self-consciously psychological film. It depicts an unfamiliar (to Americans) legal system, but is not a legal thriller. It has certain cultural particulars—humorously, the housekeeper consults a sort of dial-a-cleric to see whether it’s okay for her to help undress the old man—but its broad themes are universal.


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viewed 2/11/12 12:45 pm at Ritz 5

Circumstance (***)

Persepolis (***1/2)

IMDB link

viewed 2/6/08