Outgoing Daily Show host Jon Stewart writes and directs this adaption of journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came for Me, a story in which Stewart played a small but significant role. In 2009, ex-Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones conducted a spoof interview with Bahari on the eve of the Iranian elections wherein Jones jokingly claimed to be a spy. In the wake of the protests that followed Ahmadinejad’s contested victory over Mir Hossein Mousavi (which Bahari filmed), the Iranian authorities arrested him, charging him with espionage and producing his Daily Show interview as evidence of his “guilt”. For the next 118 days, Bahari was tortured and “interrogated”, his prime tormentor being known to the prisoner only as Rosewater. Explaining that “the original impetus for the film came from my own feelings of guilt and atonement over what happened to him in Iran”, Stewart offers a powerfully vindicating account of Bahari’s Kafkaesque ordeal. The Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal makes a very sympathetic fist of playing the Tehran-born Bahari, but Danish Kim Bodnia is the movie’s secret weapon as his tormentor, a tightly wound knot of fear and (self-)loathing whose fury toward his captive is fuelled by his own pathetically powerless circumstance. Directorially, it’s nuts-and-bolts fare, the imagined apparition of Bahari’s father (Haluk Bilginer) being one of its few stylistic flourishes. But the story is engrossing and enraging, and Stewart takes care to remind us that the real victims of oppressive regimes are those who live with them on a daily basis.
