Best Picture #4: ARGO (2012)

Ben Affleck cements his transformation from unfortunate tabloid feature to A-list director with Argo, which is not only a masterpiece of suspense filmmaking but one of the most entertaining and absurdly funny films of the year. It tells a story that could only be true, and ironically feels a little bit less realistic than Affleck’s two previous features, Gone Baby Gone and The Town.

A brief animated introduction gives us the Cliff’s Notes version of the historical background for the Iranian hostage crisis. We begin at the American embassy in Tehran just as revolutionaries, driven to action by the U.S.’s propping up of a dictator who served their oil interests, storm the front gates and take over. In a gripping suspense sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film, six Americans escape and hide themselves at the Canadian embassy.

The U.S. government catches word and tasks the CIA with getting the six trapped Americans out. Bereft of sensible ideas, agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) comes up with the only crazy thing that might work: invent a fake Hollywood sci-fi movie, pose the Americans as a Canadian film crew, send them to scout desert locations, and fly them out safely.

This proves to be their “best bad idea,” as labeled by Mendez's supervisor (Bryan Cranston), but it proves just absurd enough to work. Hollywood has always reached across enemy lines; even fascist dictators such as Kim Jong-il have professed their love for the movies. The six escaped hostages (Tate Donovan, Clea Duvall, Scoot McNairy, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Kerry Bishe) are essentially making a movie themselves: each has to play the part of a crew member on the made-up film, which proves to be tough work, especially under fire and on a deadline.

The making of the fake movie is fascinating. Mendez collaborates with makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who was revealed to be a frequent CIA collaborator, and B-movie producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), to give authenticity to the film. They even set up a staged reading of the script (Mendez and crew settle on a Star Wars knockoff called Argo) with costumes that rival David Lynch's Dune. Arkin is particularly memorable as a Roger Corman-like producer who’s neither rich nor famous but is a veritable king of trash cinema; imagine if Broadway Danny Rose were born on the opposite coast.

With precision, Mendez orchestrates the Americans’ way out of Iran, in a plan in which the slightest deviation could mean their end. A scout through the streets of Tehran, in which Iranian officials request to meet the “Canadian” crew, is brutally tense. Affleck keeps the film going at a rapid pace, and shows us each step of their tenuous escape as it progresses toward each terrifying obstacle.

Only toward the climax do Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, step wrong and make the movie, well, too Hollywood. It is not such a problem that they take liberties with the true events for dramatic purposes. In the end, the sum of the story appears to be true, even if some of the parts are exaggerated. Affleck is also sure to avoid the U-571 problem of labeling the rescue a solely “American” effort; he gives due credit to the Canadians for making the rescue possible, providing passports, and putting their own embassy at risk to do so.

For what it's worth, Affleck's character reportedly is not quite as singlehandedly responsible for orchestrating the effort as the movie suggests, and there was at least one Canadian official unmentioned in the film who appeared to put more on the line than Mendez.  Ken Taylor, the ambassador played by Victor Garber in the film, claims that his fellow Canadians could have made the extraction without the Americans getting involved at all.  This muddying of facts would matter more if Argo were a rah-rah trumpet of American exceptionalism, but Affleck's tone is not the slightest bit jingoistic.  It does not present itself as a film about Americans coming to the rescue of some helpless foreigners; I think the movie, being a movie, needed a hero, and Mendez was the one they settled on.

The climactic escape—I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal the historical truth, that the six Americans did in fact make it out alive—is unfortunately trumped up a little bit too much. The natural tension of the events would have been enough to hold our interest, but the movie introduces too many plot points that seem artificial. We could have done without the phony end-of-act-two shutdown of the operation that’s meant to deify Mendez once he disobeys orders and continues it anyway. Since we know it’s going to happen anyway, it’s a plot turn with no purpose. There's also a needless complication in which the Arkin character is kept from answering a key phone call by a movie shoot in the streets.

Though its status as a docudrama is questionable because of some obviously contrived scenarios and a Hollywoodized lead character, Argo is still a great thriller.  It begins with a seemingly unworkable premise, then walks us through it in an elaborate and compelling way.  For all the tests it fails, it passes this one: it thrills.

*** 1/2 out of ****

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