Return to Trevor

The Stoning of Soraya M.

James Caviezel, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Mozhan Marno

There was a man in the land of America whose name was Trevor; and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. It is not true, but have you ever had one of those time periods where you felt like Job, okay, at least like God’s favorite chew toy. Negative events started with the beautiful woman I was interested in getting promoted at work, which means of course that she was now filled with self-confidence, self-worth and self-esteem; and that meant my days in her life were numbered. Smart, talented, great personality, and most importantly - loved baseball, she is in many ways the total package. It took her three days after the promotion to toss me out the air lock, might be some kind of record. I think she called me a loser as she stepped over me, after putting the verbal boots to me, but I cannot be sure as my screams from passing a kidney stone kind of muffled most of what she said. Now, this is where I imagine God, Jesus and Buddha sitting on a cloud together. Jesus turned to God and says, “That looks painful.” God smiles, “You want to see something funny? Have you ever heard of sciatica?” Then all three of them start laughing. I do not know if that is true but I can tell you the emergency room nurse, who, with twenty years under her belt, had never seen the two in combination before, laughed. Now people skydive or bungee jump to get a rush but try passing a golf ball through a garden hose while a dagger is being stuck in your lower left back area, covers causing pain that runs all the way down to your knee, making it impossible at to stand on your leg, that is a true thrill ride. If you have sciatica, the only real way of dealing with it is bed rest, which means taking a few days off of work and that is kind of financially tough when you are getting paid by the hour.

Getting home I discover that I have a fine from the homeowners’ association because the lawn got a little shaggy. Never mind that the person staying with me, who cannot find a job, broke it getting it ready for the summer and for weeks, weeks, I simply asked if he could get it fixed and I would mow, even though he had nothing better to do with his day. Too much to ask, I guess. New mower… Fine. Internet server doubling my rate, great. Turn on my laptop… crashes. Some elderly Korean gentleman hands me a rather large bill for the repairs and I unquestionably pay it because he must know what he is doing because he is Asian. Feel bad that that thought might be racist until I get home and notice that one of the hinges is starting to break because he put the screws back in too tight, he screwed up, which means I am going to have to replace the computer at some point. He is a red, white, and blue American just like me. On my way home I stop by hell, Walmart on a Saturday. I limp through the store dodging the old people in their scooters and the children who seem to be running wild in the place, when one of them runs into my leg almost sending me to my knees. I give the parents a thumbs up because it is nice to know that crappy parenting is universal. Speaking of crappy parenting, I remembered that I had promised a friend that I would go to his four-year-old’s soccer game. Now I am sure that there is some European or Latin American country where children’s soccer is not the bastion of over protective parenting but some resourceful American should sell revolvers or taint punch at these matches because they are as interesting as watching paint dry and suicide seems like a positive alternative until you realize that death, nothingness, is just an eternal soccer game. My cell phone goes off. It is one of my eternal house guests. The microwave is dying, beeping from time to time for some unknown reason and acting like a Teamster, working only when it wants to, and the DVD player is already dead. I tell him to go to my closet and get my other DVD player, an all-region, progressive scan machine that I had spent some good coin on a few years ago. He cannot find it. It seems a miracle has happened and this piece of technology has developed legs and probably walked to the nearest pawn shop I am guessing. Now this is where I imagine Jesus, Buddha and God looking down again, and God says, “You know what Trevor needs right now, a good old fashioned movie about stoning, you know, one of those wacky tales where a whole bunch of middle aged judgmental types chuck rocks at some young girl because that is what a loving God like myself would want. I personally love a good stoning, which is why I commanded it in all of my holy books.” In the middle of another mindless blockbuster summer comes a movie with subtitles about stoning. Transformers 2 sold out, give me a ticket to a movie about a chick getting her head bashed in with a low tech rock.

Stoning was one of the preferred forms of capital punishment throughout the Middle East for centuries, covering a whole host of sins from homosexuality to adultery, to bestiality, to disrespecting one’s parents, to blasphemy, to sorcery. While Christians have never really practiced it, mainly because they did not have the power when it was popular, the Jews began to feel that capital punishment was not a good thing shortly after the time of Jesus, and there are those nagging cases of James the Just, Timothy, Stephen, and that woman Jesus stumbled upon. Yet, it is a great form of capital punishment. There is no individual guilt as the mob mentality takes over, and who is to say which stone actually killed the person, and it is as symbolic as all get out. In the Middle East, next to sand, stones should be the main export. While stoning seems like something out of the past, every once in a while the modern world wakes up to find that stoning is still with us. The Stoning of Soraya M. is based on the killing of a young woman in 1986 Iran.

If any actor can make a film that is basically a cinematic murder interesting, it is Jesus, at least the guy who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, James Caviezel. Adapted from French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s 1994, it was a major hit of the Toronto International Film Festival, finishing second for the Audience Choice Award.

Of course it is a heartbreaking story of a patriarchal society dominated by Sharia law. Soraya (Mozhan Marno) was an exemplary Muslim wife for the hard hearted Ali (Navid Negahban) to whom she bore a pair of sons but Ali has grown tired of his wife and has been offered the chance to marry a fourteen-year-old girl. One little problem, he is still married to Soraya and does not have enough money to buy his way out of the marriage. Solution: accuse his wife of sleeping with the repugnant Hashem (Parviz Sayyad), a man whose house Soraya has helped clean after the death of his wife, with the penalty for adultery being death. The last third of the movie basically lives up to its title. It is a black-and-white movie. The good people are good and the bad, bad, no shading. Watching it I was reminded how powerful the much more morally complicated Dead Man Walking was. This film is nowhere in that league.

Six of the fifty-two Muslim countries of the world have laws promoting stoning as a form of capital punishment and in almost every one of those countries women are treated like second class citizens, abused and mistreated. A film like this is for the PBS crowd who are already against capital punishment in general, let alone stoning. But you want to know the worst thing about this movie? It does not allow me to feel sorry for myself. Damn you, God. I want to have a pity party and you cannot when confronted with real injustice in the world.

Verdict: A Good Film, But Not a Feel Good Film