Mark Reviews Movies: A HERO

A Hero, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 6, 2022

Things are finally looking up for Rahim (Amir Jadidi) at the beginning of A Hero. That's the impression we get from him, as he walks out of the front door of a jail, looking around him on a bright and hopeful day, with a big smile on his face. Even when he misses the bus to bring him home, that smile remains.

Rahim smiles a lot. That's one of his signature looks. Anytime he approaches someone new or familiar in writer/director Asghar Farhadi's film, Rahim has that smile. It's like an invitation: You can trust this guy.

The other of his regular appearances is much different. He lowers his head, with a frown and an absent stare in his eyes. This is an invitation, too: You should feel sorry for this poor man, who only wants himself, the people he loves, and everyone else to be happy. When the smile doesn't work, this look can.

One wonders if Rahim is aware of this. He obviously knows he has this effect on people—gaining their trust with that grin and earning their pity with that, as the man who had him thrown in jail calls it, "hangdog" look. Is it a conscious decision, though, to employ these looks? Does he actively manipulate people, or are others simply influenced by his gregarious charm and his naked disappointment?

There's a big difference between those options. One suggests Rahim is cold and calculated. The other simply means that he might be too honest for his own good. That we never really know for sure—even after seeing Rahim fib and falsify or forget and innocently fudge the facts—is one of the great strengths of Farhadi's precisely crafted drama about the various shades of morality.

Rahim could be a con artist, or he could just be a foundationally nice guy who doesn't want to get himself into more trouble than he already possesses (Jadidi smartly plays up the charm, while keeping whatever is driving the character so close to the chest that it's impossible to determine his real motive). The key to understanding why this film works as well as it does—not only as a character study and a grounded example of Murphy's Law at work, but also as a deeper consideration of morality and ethics—is to realize one thing. It's fairly simple, too: It doesn't matter if Rahim is a deliberate liar or an accidental one. The consequences for him, for his situation, for his reputation, and for those who become a part of his scheming/mistakes wouldn't have changed either way.

To put in simplistic terms of morality, bad people can do good things, and good people can do bad things. Here, we're left wondering, not only if there are essentially good or bad people, but also if we can categorize any given deed as inherently good.

Mostly, though, the film is a tightly plotted tale of constantly twisting, stretching, and constricting consequences to seemingly innocent and mundane choices. The first, from which all the others unfold and unwind and gradually undo our protagonist, happened before we meet Rahim.

He is currently an inmate in a debtor's prison near the Iranian city of Shiraz—and has been for three years. Given a two-day leave, Rahim briefly reunites with his family—sister Malileh (Maryam Shahdaei), brother-in-law Hossein (Alireza Jahandideh), and son Siavash (Saleh Karimai), who has a stutter—and gets to work on his plan for getting out of jail.

It involves his new and secret fiancée Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), who discovered a purse on the street a week prior. Inside the bag were 17 gold coins, which, at the time Farkhondeh discovered them, were valued to cover about half of Rahim's debt. Surely, Bahram (Hohsen Tanabandeh), to whom Rahim is indebted, will accept the money from selling the coins as enough payment to have Rahim released from prison.

There are a few snags with our protagonist's plan. First, Bahram won't answer Rahim's texts or calls. Second, the price of gold has decreased in the intervening week. Third, when Hossein finally does contact Bahram, Rahim's creditor refuses to accept the deal. That's when Rahim decides it'll be better to find the bag's original owner and return the valuable coins to her. After a woman calls the prison (Rahim put that number on the posters) with an accurate description of the bag and its contents, he does return the purse, by way of Malielh, and suddenly, he becomes a local hero.

Is this a good deed, for which Rahim won't go unpunished, or is it a new plan, trying to gain respect and sympathy from people in the hopes that he'll be rewarded, for which he is rightly and cosmically punished? Farhadi is crafty in the way Rahim comes across as if either possibility is completely logical. The craft of the plotting is in its logic, too—in how a single detail of, change to, or justification within Rahim's story affects how he and his intentions are perceived, whether or not people believe his tale, and what problems will inevitably come next for him.

The specifics of how Rahim's fortunes collapse around him—and do they ever—are too many to describe. In general terms, it's impressive how much suspense Farhadi generates by allowing us to anticipate the consequences of increasing fibs/slips in Rahim's tellings of the incident and his choices—egged on by prison officials who might be manipulating Rahim to cover up their own problems, trying to protect Farkhondeh's reputation, making sure to emphasize that fate seemed to be pushing his conscience in the right direction.

There's just as much moral tension in being able to see through the cracks of Rahim's intentional/accidental falsehoods, even as we know the basics of his story are honest (Meanwhile, Bahram, who seems unjustifiably stubborn at first, makes some good points about Rahim's so-called heroism and becomes surprisingly sympathetic). As for whether or not Rahim is fundamentally honest, that's a completely different—and, in the grand scheme of things, wholly irrelevant—story.

Farhadi has made a simple but thoroughly compelling tale of actions and their consequences. A Hero suggests that those are the only things that really matter, while morality is just the story we tell others and ourselves.

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