Central Intelligence

Sometimes a movie, no matter how good or bad, strikes a chord that enables it to transcend traditional critical and esthetic judgments. Such is the case with Rawson Marshall Thurber's Central Intelligence. The subject of the movie is bullying and for all intents and purposes it falls into line with a whole bunch of recent silly comedies (The Boss, The Nice Guys) that gain traction by crossing the line with respect to political correctness or taste while at the same time dealing with shall we say "developmental issues." The idea is that a bullied high school student (Dwayne Johnson), who is the subject of a cruel prank, grows up to be the equivalent of Superman. He becomes a C.I.A. agent of extraordinary talents with a physique to match. Both sides of the movie’s protagonist (the before and after) are cartoons. The comedy is a little like Popeye’s biceps which are always ready to explode. But the subliminal effect of all the hyperbole is to detoxify trauma while giving it full imaginative play. Central Intelligence manages to be both antiseptic (to the extent that the bullying that’s presented is so exaggerated as to defy realistic concerns) and at the same curiously psychological. The subject of the bullying comments that he's pushed the incidents that occurred years before far down. They run him, but he’s at the same time rarely, if ever, cognizant of them—despite the fact that the central line of plot has him glomming on to the class valedictorian and star athlete (Kevin Hart), the one person who ever treated him with respect. Melissa McCarthy makes a cameo appearance as another damaged soul—she’s cross-eyed—who’s reunited with her the weirdo on whom she’d had a crush. In the end, everyone marches into the sunset or rather into the CIA, an agency which, despite the clandestine neuronal like connectivity with which it’s portrayed, is not to be confused with the central nervous system.

Rosewater

The Daily Show is considered primarily a comedy program finding it’s provenance in That Was the Week That Was and the media parodies on SNL. However, there’s undoubtedly a substantial segment of The Daily Show’s audience for whom the program’s satire is their primary news source. And if the satire about seemingly sacrosanct news items seems tasteless, the argument can be made that the grotesquery of what is going on in Iraq and Syria, in the Ukraine and to the Ozone layer is what’s truly lacking in taste. Rosewater,, the movie about the imprisonment of Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal) in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison (based on his memoir Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival), was directed by Jon Stewart, of Daily Show fame. However, as a director Stewart’s persona is a far cry from that of the television host. Instead of treating Bahari’s story as a comic strip or subject of satire (in the way Argo partially did in its tale of a notorious escape from Iran), Stewart tackles his subject with deadly seriousness. If there are humorous elements like one in which Bahari entices the film’s eponymous interrogator (Kim Bodnia) with stories about massage excursions in the exotic New Jersey city of Fort Lee, they’re intrinsic to the reality of what’s going on. The movie is curiously complex and a far cry from the kind of homiletics that are often the dark side of the satirist’s trade. The association between Rosewater and Rosebud is not serendipitous when one considers that one of the main axes Bahari’s tormentors have to grind is the link between journalism and spying. Whether Stewart or Bahari intended it, it’s hard not to fault the Iranian hardliners their insinuation of collusion (however one might detest their methods). The movie points to layers upon layers of connections rather than disconnects between the journalist and his captors, including the fact that Bahari’s father had been a prisoner of a common enemy the Shah—whose rise to power had come about due to the CIA’s machinations against the democratically elected Mosaddegh back in l953. There’s a scene where Bahari is about to be executed in the prison courtyard. His interrogator pulls the trigger, but there are no bullets in the gun. It’s a replication of an event in Dostoevsky’s early life. One wonders if the character, whose novelistic sensibility Stewart so vividly paints in Rosewater (personal/historical flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film), will someday turn the nightmare he lived into a great work of fiction.