The film was Argo, this year’s Academy Award Best Picture winner, and both Charles and liked it but I didn’t think it really achieved greatness. It certainly began with one of the most fascinating premises for a movie imaginable: the real-life rescue of six of the personnel from the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran in 1980 after Iranian students loyal to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized the U.S. Embassy and held over 50 people hostage for over a year until they were released the day Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter as president of the U.S.: an event the hostage crisis had done quite a bit to bring about. The six escaped being held inside the U.S. Embassy by sneaking out the building’s side entrance (ironically, a door that was usually used to accommodate Iranians seeking visas to enter the U.S.!) and into the official residence of the Canadian ambassador, where they remained for over three months. They were even referred to as “house guests” and the Canadians put their own lives and liberties on the line sheltering them. But they couldn’t leave the building without risking being apprehended either by Iranian authorities or the same sorts of mobs that had taken the U.S. embassy in the first place, and the State Department was put in charge of trying to come up with some way to sneak them out of Iran and into a friendly country from which they could make their way back home. The State Department called in agents from the CIA, including an “exfil” expert (“exfil” is short for “exfiltration,” and in the movie one of the people in the Canadian ambassador’s house notes that he’s never heard the word before) named Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directed). He hears various plans being discussed, including issuing them bicycles (how would they get them to them?) so they could bicycle the 300 miles to the Turkish border; trying to pass them off as Canadian agriculture experts advising Iran’s agriculture department (Tony points out that it’s the dead of winter and no agriculture expert visits a country in the middle of the season where nothing grows); trying to pass them off as teachers at the International School in Tehran (which has been closed for at least eight months); and the scheme Tony finally thinks of on his own and, in the face of skepticism from the State Department, puts into action. It calls for passing off the six American Embassy personnel as members of a Canadian filmmaking team that went to Iran to scout possible locations for a science-fiction movie on the basis that much of the Middle East is desert and therefore suitable to represent what most movie audiences believe other life-bearing planets would look like.
To make it seem credible Tony has to hire a producer — he finds an old, over-the-hill one named Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin, giving a performance that reminded me a good deal of Dann Florek’s police-captain character in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) — and buy the rights to a script called Argo whose writer intended it as the story of Jason and the Argonauts transposed to outer space. (Lester has never heard of the story of Jason and the Argonauts and therefore, when he’s asked at a press conference, he has no idea what the title of his putative movie means: later he coins the phrase, “Argo, fuck you” and that becomes a recurring motif throughout the film.) The plan calls for Tony to fly into Iran and collect the Americans, then leave with them through the various checkpoints — a relatively easy (he thinks) one at the airport, a tougher one at Iran’s immigration department and a really tough one staffed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — as if they’ve only been there for two days. Of course, this being a movie, he pulls it off despite the usual complications — including the pass system Iran introduces at the airport just before his arrival, whereby when you land in Iran the person at the desk who admits you writes two copies of your document, a yellow one you’re supposed to turn in when you leave and a white one they keep so they can match it with yours and make sure you’re who you say you are and you came to Iran when you said you did. Argo came on a DVD with a documentary featurette on the actual rescue — which included one odd fillip which writer Chris Terrio (working from a memoir by the real Tony Mendez and a Wired magazine article about the rescue) left out of his script: even after they finally got on the plane to Zurich, Switzerland, mechanical trouble kept the plane grounded at Tehran for a half-hour and naturally made the escapees even more frightened than they already were. (The script did include the scene in which all the escapees have cocktails once they’re told by the flight attendants that, now that the plane is out of Iranian airspace, alcoholic drinks may once again be served.)
Argo turned out to be a quite entertaining movie, well
acted (as films directed by actors generally are — as I’ve noted in these pages
before, even actor-directors who as actors were heavy-duty hams, like Erich von
Stroheim and Orson Welles, managed to get understated performances from their
cast members), well staged and benefiting from Affleck’s decision to shoot it
on film instead of digital equipment and to use half-frames, blown up 200
percent, to give it a grainy look that would make it look like a late-1970’s movie. He also used the form of
the Warner Bros. logo that was in use when the film takes place instead of the
return to the classic “shield” version Warners has done since. Argo is a largely understated movie that makes the
business of heroism seem just that — a business — Tony Mendez is portrayed as
cool and dispassionate (except when he’s trying to talk the State Department
bureaucrats out of ideas that don’t work, or when he’s frantically trying to
call the U.S. President because the White House has canceled the operation to
prepare for the April 1980 attempt to stage a raid to free the Embassy hostages
and he needs Presidential intervention to get the op back on again) and the
film as a whole is constantly stimulating but rarely exciting. It’s the sort of
attempt at a thriller that makes one wish Alfred Hitchcock were still alive —
even a relatively minor Hitchcock film like Torn Curtain (a comparison I picked because it’s also about an
attempt to smuggle someone out of an unfriendly country) has far more thrills
than Argo. What makes Argo fun are the bits of wit in Terrio’s script —
especially its mordant observations about Hollywood (when Tony explains the
plan to his movie-business contact, makeup artist John Chambers [John Goodman],
Chambers says, “So you want to come to Hollywood, act like a big shot, without
actually doing anything? You’ll fit right in!”), though even those were done
better in the somewhat similarly plotted Wag the Dog, and also its refusal to present the Iranian hostage
drama as a straight morality play.
Befitting its origins as a production for
George Clooney’s Smokehouse company — Clooney and his producing partner, Grant
Heslov, are listed among the six executive producers and Clooney was originally
set to play Tony Mendez — Argo
takes a refreshingly nuanced view of U.S.-Iranian relations during the last
part of the 20th century, beginning a prologue with a voice-over
narrator explaining over newsreel footage that the Iranians elected a prime
minister named Mohammed Mossadegh in 1950 and three years later he was
overthrown by the CIA and its British equivalent because he nationalized the
holdings of U.S. and British oil companies in Iran. It also superbly integrates
clips of the actual TV news coverage of the hostage situation in 1980 — the
joins are seamless precisely because
Affleck and his cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, did their tricks with grain to
make the “new” footage look like late-1970’s material. It also has an unusually
appropriate set of music selections, including some of the mainstream pop-rock
hits of the time; you get the impression you’re hearing what the characters
would actually have listened to. (The soundtrack CD might actually be worth
owning even though none of the songs on it, except maybe Dire Straits’ “Sultans
of Swing,” are truly great.) Argo
simply isn’t all that exciting — and certainly the material had the makings of
a nail-biting thriller in it, but screenwriter Terrio managed to get the worst
of both worlds, carefully editing the real story to fit it to the usual movie
clichés and thereby distorting it a great deal but not enough that it made a
viscerally exciting movie. Part of the problem is Ben Affleck’s performance;
he’s quite competent (all too often Ben Affleck has turned in performances
either so slovenly or so ridiculously over-stylized as to be ludicrous) but
he’s covered with a full beard (like Al Pacino in Serpico) and his character is drawn so one-dimensionally
about his only big dramatic issue is that because of the demands of his job
he’s become separated from his wife and their child — and, natch, they
reconcile (at least briefly) at the end.
Director Affleck got a decent
performance from actor Affleck but the obscure Allen Coulter got an even better
one out of him as George Reeves in Hollywoodland (another highly fictionalized movie based on real
events), which to my mind remains Affleck’s best film (of the ones I’ve seen,
anyway). Argo is less
self-conscious of its own “importance” than Lincoln, its principal rival at the Academy Awards, but
though both films are flawed Lincoln seemed to me to live
more. Charles said he thought Argo
won the Academy Award for Best Picture for much the same reason he thought The
King’s Speech did: both movies are
literally about the power of acting (the memoir by the real Tony Mendez on
which Argo was based was called The
Master of Disguise) and the ability of
professional entertainers to render themselves and their services invaluable to
the continued smooth exercise of government power. There may be something to
that, or as I suspect the Academy simply wasn’t comfortable giving a bunch of
awards to a film so consciously
designed to win Oscars as Lincoln
(and the professional jealousy of virtually everyone else in Hollywood towards
Steven Spielberg, whom they venomously, enviously hate for having made half of
the most popular movies of all time, didn’t help either!), looked for an
alternative and made Argo the
“safe” alternative to Lincoln the
way Crash emerged as the “safe”
alternative to Brokeback Mountain
a few years ago. One irony is that in 1980 the CIA clamped down on all
knowledge of the “Hollywood operation” and gave Tony Mendez an award for it but
insisted on keeping it a secret, with the result that when the six freed
hostages finally returned to U.S. soil it was the Canadians who got all the
credit for their release — and this movie has gone so far in the other
direction that it’s made it seem like the Canadians were just people who happened to have a house available and
the American secret agents did all the work!
