Oppressive, delusional regimes will use nearly anything to preserve power, including the demeaning brutality of solitary confinement. In Jon Stewart’s powerful, perceptive adaptation of journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir of his 118 days in an Iranian prison in 2006, we see the resiliency of the human spirit. We also witness a prisoner fighting back by exploiting his interrogator’s own vulnerabilities.
Played with remarkable subtly by Gael Garcia Bernal, the Newsweek correspondent Bahari’s endures his tormentor’s crushing tactics. Bahari’s interrogator, “Rosewater,” is hellbent on extracting a false confession. Though Rosewater postures himself as puritanical, Bahari comes to identify his abuser’s sexual obsession and reduces him into prurient revery with tales of ecstatic massages in New Jersey. (Rosewater’s family, we come to learn, was brutally repressed under The Shah.)
Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay, pulls no punches in holding up a mirror to a regime that brazenly responds to the protesters with violence once they take to the streets. A passionate, rebellious electorate that supports dissident challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi is insulted by a fixed election forced on them by the theocratic government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While covering a peaceful demonstration Bahari changes course to cover another group’s taunting of the government militia, and the militia’s particularly harsh response. He then shoots video footage that was exclusive at a time when most foreign journalists had either gone home or stayed in their hotels. What was to have been a mere weeklong absence from his pregnant girlfriend back in London changes into his sudden apprehension while asleep in the home of his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in Teheran. Accused of being a spy for the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, Bahari is blindfolded and the torture begins.
Stewart, who took off 12 weeks from The Daily Show and filmed in Jordan with veteran cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, demonstrates an economy of style that is surprisingly savvy for a first time director. Archival footage is seamlessly mixed into the street scenes. Stewart’s handling of Bahari’s solitary confinement is upheld with the recurring device of Bahari’s dead father appearing in his cell. Their conversation details his communist father’s own time in jail during The Shah’s regime in Iran but it also captures his fierce dedication to standing up to especially despotic authority. Bahari’s sister, recently deceased after also facing imprisonment under the Ayatollah Khomeini, also appears in flashbacks.
Before his imprisonment, Bahari interviewed with satirist Jason Jones on Stewart’s Daily Show. What was intended as a preposterous interview with Jones asking Ali-G-style questions to Bahari, is later brought up to him by his interrogators in prison as if it were somehow proof of his complicity in spying against the Ahmadinejad regime. “Why would a spy have a TV show?” Bahari asks. Later, as international pressure from Hillary Clinton starts a momentum that will eventually spring him from jail, Bahari does a dance in his cell to Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. It’s one more incredible moment of Bernal’s highly textured interpretation of what it must have been like, in terms of anger, despair, and resilience, to have stared in the face of his own death. His survival gives hope to truth overcoming fear in times so fraught with uncertainty that no matter who’s in charge they’re probably not to be trusted.