‘A Hero’ should be subtitled ‘Dammit, now what?’
Amazon
Oscar-winning Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s success comes from drawing out interpersonal conflict from everyday situations and contrasting low-key staging with big-time emotions. You don’t name movies “A Separation” and “The Past” and “Everybody Knows” and, now, “A Hero” if you don’t want your work to make grand statements about people and who they are and how they interact.
So it’s incredibly disappointing and annoying when a film with this approach uses its characters as pawns to fit a story engineered for maximum screw-up and false starts. Eventually you really expect several people in “A Hero” to scream, “Oh, come on!” Because this is a plot that doesn’t lend itself to rich insights about shortcuts and lies and societal systems that make life harder instead of easier. It’s just one that says, “Sheesh, maybe take more than three seconds to make a decision when lies are involved?”
In what sometimes feels like a less-effective cousin of Bobcat Goldthwait’s memorable, uncomfortable 2009 satire “World’s Greatest Dad,” “A Hero” follows Rahim (Amir Jadidi) as his life expands and contracts while out on leave from prison. He’s only in there because of a debt, and while out he achieves local celebrity after returning a bag filled with gold coins to its sobbing, grateful owner. Except there are a few parts of that last sentence that aren’t exactly accurate, and “A Hero” seems to think it is uncovering smart nuances about the way that law enforcement rules over the powerless, or how deception, even when it exists in the same neighborhood as generosity, can only lead to failure and a house of cards on a windy day.
Perhaps some will go for that; “A Hero” won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2021. But to me it felt like Farhadi refused to be curious about the people who are supposedly so impressed with Rahim or to let the people dancing on a delicate line of selfless and selfish, truth and deceit, to be smart enough to look ahead in the slightest. The story drives the characters instead of the other way around, with numerous contrivances and questionable motivations that create doubts about the narrative rather than complexity about the walls closing in. As a society we’re way beyond the notion of binary personas, and it’s not as if “A Hero” does much to examine who gets propped up by towns or TV shows, or how or why. There’s plenty more to say about vetting and honesty, not to mention how desperate many people are for good news and reasons to believe that people are good.
But “A Hero” isn’t tragic or heavy, just frustrating and phony. Cue the Mariah Carey song on the end credits. (Not really.)
C
ARE YOU A “SAVED BY THE BELL” FAN?
Order “Zack Morris Lied 329 Times! Reassessing every ridiculous episode of ‘Saved by the Bell’ … with stats” (featuring interviews with 22 cast members, plus the co-founder of Saved by the Max and the creator of “Zack Morris is Trash”)
GET 100 STORIES FOR JUST $4.99