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A woman I saw The Stoning of Soraya M. with complained that the men in movie were all lifeless stereotypes. She even cited Roger Ebert. As one of the characters in the movie remarks, “You were never able to read between the words.”
In one sense, these men are lifeless stereotypes: to stone an innocent–or even a guilty–woman to death, you have to be not only not in touch with your own feelings, but out of touch with your humanity as well.
One of the men is her husband, who cooks up an adulterous affair for her, so he can get rid of her and marry a younger woman. He is the father of their four children. No matter how unhappily married you are, is death by stoning the only alternative?
But that’s not all. He not only forces her two young sons to watch the stoning, but makes them cast stones at their mother too. (I couldn’t help thinking, “Let he who is guiltless cast the first stone.”)
Can you possibly love your children if you force them to do something so abhorrent, something that will haunt them till the day they die? And, possibly, make them so detached from their own humanity that they can stone another woman in their turn.
The husband doesn’t stone his wife reluctantly; he does it joyously. Like a shark in a feeding frenzy, he is delirious with excitement. He even whips up the enthusiasm of all the men in the village. With them behind him, his cowardly act become heroic.
I don’t think I could write so much about this man if he were just a lifeless stereotype. I don’t admire him, of course, but I can see him as a whole, if extremely flawed human being. I don’t think he’s evil, because I don’t believe in the concept: it implies that the wrongdoers are all over there while we, the good ones, are here. But we are all flawed human beings and all on the same continuum, so that none of us is so completely guilt-free that we can cast the first stone.
Other men in the village have their reasons to stone Soraya. The man who is forced to testify to her adultery at first resists. But the threat that he too will be stoned and his retarded son will become a helpless orphan makes him a reluctant, agonized participant.
The mullah is a fraud, a former prison inmate, and the husband has the goods on him. If he wants to save his reputation–and his ass–he has to play along. To show how holy and otherworldly he is, he has a barber give him a haircut before he appears before the mob.
Peer compulsion makes the others join in. It takes immense courage to defy a mob. Soraya’s father doesn’t have the guts to stand up to the village and he uses his daughter’s sinfulness as an excuse to stone her.
I could probably create back stories for all the main male characters, but I think I’ve made my point. None of them is a paper-doll cutout, exactly the same as all the others.
The only person who stands up to the mob is not a man, but Soraya’s aunt, Zahra, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo with the same passion and intensity that Anne Bancroft often brought to her roles. She looks like Bancroft too. You may remember her from House of Sand and Fog.
Zahra tries to appeal to the consciences of the stoners but to no avail. She is rewarded for her audacity by being made a pariah, characterized as a crazy old woman. Among the many unthinkable things she does is to bury Soraya’s body, which is against Sharia law.
She says of one character, “A Sheikh? More like a holy whore.”
There is a framing story, which now seems absurd and unnecessary. James Caviezel plays the real-life Paris-based Iranian journalist who finally told this horrific story to the world. For some reason, his conversations with Zahra are in English. Go figure. Most of the dialog is in Farsi with sharp, clear, always readable subtitles, although his subvocalizer would have preferred that they stayed on screen longer.
The director, Cyrus Nowrasteh, co-authored the script. He also wrote the TV shows The Path to 9/11, The Day Reagan Was Shot and The Advocate's Devil.
Be forewarned: the stoning scenes are graphic and almost unbearable to watch. It would have been a mercy if all the men had thrown their stones at the same time, so Soraya would have died instantly, but what would be the fun in that?
Produced by Fallen Films.
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