ROSEWATER IS A SENTIMENTAL SCHLOCK-FEST
Jon Stewart’s directorial debut feels contrived in its bid to deliver drama
Jon Stewart has a great day job. As host of the hugely popular Daily Show, the comedian and writer has access to the hearts and minds of the American public on a nightly basis, and he makes the most of it every time he sits down to offer highly editorialized, absurdly true, news content.
Stewart is a success and a celebrity and in many ways, an important piece of U.S. current events, which makes his failure as a filmmaker a lot easier to process.
Rosewater, Stewart’s first feature, is a sentimental mess that registers as a consistent flat line, but we can still respect him and star Gael García Bernal because it’s obvious they had their hearts, minds and money in the right place.
Based on the real life events that saw Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari detained for five months in 2009, Rosewater feels like something Stewart felt morally compelled to complete because Bahari’s incarceration was due, in large part, to Stewart’s show.
Bahari appeared on The Daily Show in an interview segment with mock reporter Jason Jones in the midst of the Iranian elections. As a veteran reporter with Newsweek and a native Iranian, Bahari offered insights and expertise on the issues, but was mostly just a good sport as Jones ribbed him about terrorism and espionage and anti-American feelings in the Middle East.
The whole session was standard silliness, but authorities in Tehran clearly haven’t boarded the big orange bus of irony, because they hauled Bahari off to jail, isolated him, punched him, kicked him, beat him with a belt and frequently put a gun to his head demanding he confess his ties to U.S. authorities.
The experience would have been terrifying and altogether life altering. Sitting in a jail cell without any contact to the outside world, accused of something you did not do, is a universal nightmare.
But it’s not necessarily cinematic, and that’s something Stewart failed to realize all the way through the creation of his film.
You can’t just show someone sitting in a room and cook up drama.
You can shoot it from every angle known to humankind, create lavish green screen quilts of information, and hire some of the best actors in the business, but without direct conflict and a dilemma in three dimensions, things start to flatten out pretty quickly.
Making things even more problematic is our pathetic, but entirely natural, compulsion to compare suffering, and we’ve been exposed to plenty of images of real human misery in our lifetimes.
Bernal is highly sympathetic because he’s a talented actor who understands how to make every character feel like an old friend, but for the most part, we’re just watching him look pensive as he reflects on his character’s predicament.
Moreover, it doesn’t look all that bad. Sure, it’s jail. And yes, he could be executed at any time. But we’ve seen so much worse, even in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, where it’s the Americans running roughshod over human rights.
In short, it’s hard to take any accurate measure of evil in this film without feeling a little facile.
Everything feels rigged, like a Rube Goldberg mechanism designed to drop us in a bucket of empathy and moral reflection.
You can hear every gear and cog whirring away in this screeching machine of sentiment, but Stewart seems oblivious to the thumping racket of his own heavy hand.
He’s insistent and unapologetic in his bid to deliver drama.
He’s also surprisingly schlocky, and that’s probably the biggest surprise in Rosewater as we travel ever closer to a greasy heart of schmaltz, where Stewart holds us captive in his emotional oil slick for the duration, without a hint of cleansing intellectual solvent.