Rosewater

Comedian Jon Stewart of The Daily Show makes his directorial debut with the true-life drama Rosewater, starring Gael Garcia Bernal as Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. While covering the 2009 elections in Tehran, Bahari was jailed and tortured for several weeks, and his appearance on The Daily Show was used by Iranian officials to prove that he was working as a spy. Jason Jones plays himself in the scene recreating the taped interview, and to his and Stewart's credit, they don't shy away from implicating their own sarcastic dismissiveness in Bahari's fate. Rosewater reaches for those same levels of sensitivity and evenhandedness throughout, often to its own detriment and nearly to the point of flavorlessness. Stewart, who also adapted the Bahari memoir Then They Came for Me, overfills his plate with agenda items when he should have focused on the characters, and the result is strangely impersonal.