'Rosewater': Jon Stewart makes amends in fine first film

'What is this? Porno?" asks the Iranian official, holding aloft a DVD of a Pasolini film from the 1960s. "Porno?" he says again, accusingly, as he and his henchmen rip apart the bedroom of journalist Maziar Bahari, finding a volume of The Sopranos.

And that Leonard Cohen album he's waving in the air? "Jewish?"

Before Rosewater goes dark and brutal, before its real-life protagonist, Bahari (a compelling Gael Garcia Bernal), gets blindfolded and carted off to solitary confinement, this first film by The Daily Show host Jon Stewart is actually kind of funny.

Funny in a nightmarish, this-could-all-turn-terrible way.

Rosewater is adapted from Bahari's 2011 memoir, Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival, which pivots on his coverage of the 2009 Iranian presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath. The film finds Bahari returning to Tehran from his new home in London, where his wife is pregnant with their first child. Bahari, who reports for the BBC and Newsweek, is staying with his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in his native land and taking his video camera to the streets to interview the citizenry - young idealists eager to elect a reform leader, dogmatic Islamic fundamentalists, seasoned campaign workers, pundits.

Then, Bahari gets interviewed himself, by Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones - one of those deadpan mock-news one-on-ones that have become a trademark of Stewart's program. Jones announces that the journalist is an American spy, Bahari tries to contain his giggles, and they go on their way.

A few days later, the Revolutionary Guard interrogator shows up from the notorious Evin Prison in northern Tehran - the same hellhole where Bahari's father and sister had been sent as political prisoners years before. The Jason Jones interview was taken as clear evidence that Bahari was colluding with American spies, with the Zionists. Aren't all Western journalists agents of the CIA anyway?

Bahari is literally trapped in the Kafkaesque absurdity of it all, and his interrogator (Kim Bodnia), identified only as Rosewater, beats him, berates him, tries to break him. As Bahari huddles in his cell, the ghost of his father appears; as the days drag on, his spirit flags. They serve him food crawling with ants.

But at a certain point, the relationship between captor and captive begins to change. Stewart, who wrote the screenplay and directs, handles this key transition well enough, but it is Bernal who does the heavy lifting, who brings the moment home. Stewart's casting instincts were dead-on.

Part of the impetus for Stewart's choosing this project comes from a sense of culpability. If The Daily Show's Jones hadn't interviewed Bahari in that Tehran cafe, he might not have been carted off to jail, where he spent 118 days in captivity. Stewart covered Bahari's ordeal, and his wife's media campaign to secure his freedom. He had the released Bahari as a guest once.

That's not a spoiler. The news coverage, the memoir - the outcome of Bahari's incarceration and torture has been well-documented.

Now, despite a few first-time filmmaker indulgences, the story has been made into a strong, striking political drama.

Directed by Jon Stewart. With Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Claire Foy. Distributed by Open Road.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 mins.

Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, adult themes).

Playing at: area theaters.EndText

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