Argo (Film)

Argo Review

 

“Caper” films are among the most popular of movie genres. From Asphalt Jungle to Ocean’s Eleven, the linear storylines and requisite elements of suspense draw you in and pin you to your seat. Argo, the new film directed by and starring Ben Affleck, falls squarely into the genre, but instead of a jewel heist or a prison escape, this caper includes an automatic “feel good” factor. It’s a daring rescue of the innocent good guys from the evil bad guys. The good guys are a group of American embassy workers in Iran in 1979. The bad guys are the revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah and captured the American embassy along with 52 hostages with whom they taunted America and Jimmy Carter for more than a year before releasing them shortly after the swearing in of Ronald Reagan in 1981.

 

The fascinating historical twist in the story is that in addition to the 52 Americans who were taken as hostages, six Americans actually escaped the embassy unbeknownst to the Iranians and hid out in the Canadian embassy for several weeks until they were rescued and flown out of the country in a top secret CIA mission known as “Argo.”

 

Even though Iran’s ideological war with the West is still front page news today, I suspect most Americans don’t remember how we got on their bad side in the first place. As a reminder, the film is introduced with a succinct and factual history lesson about how the American CIA in 1953 had engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah. He was of course friendly to the United States, but he also declared himself absolute monarch and proceeded to plunder the country, flaunting an unbelievably luxurious lifestyle while ordinary Iranians sometimes starved. When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, America was justifiably one of the main targets for the revolutionaries’ anger.

 

The history lesson is important to the film because it prepares us for our plunge into the middle of what can only be called a revolutionary maelstrom. The historical prologue ends in a wonderful interweaving of documentary footage and filmic re-creations with the revolution surging and swirling around us – riots, demonstrations, and propaganda actions colliding and mingling as if we are there on the ground being buffeted and swept along. The revolutionary fury culminates in the overrunning of the American embassy, the capture of the hostages, and the escape of the six.

 

Throughout the film, the scenes in Iran are shot in a more or less documentary style. Here the camera is unsteady, often hand-held and sometimes downright woozy in its movement. The high contrast and grainy texture of the images also contributes to the documentary feel.  When the film moves to Washington and California, where the feel of the late 70s is faithfully maintained, the look of the film is polished and well tooled even when the mood is hypertense. And everyone in Washington gets very tense very quickly because the six rogue Americans, who didn’t get themselves captured with the others, are in great danger of being discovered by the Iranians and executed as spies.

 

Enter CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) with a crazy plan – “just crazy enough that it might work” - to get the six out of the country by having them pose as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science fiction film. For me, this is always the fun part of caper films, convincing the doubters that the plan might work and then getting the gang members on board. In this case the most important stateside partners are John Chambers (played by John Goodman) a veteran Hollywood makeup artist with good connections in the industry and Lester Siegel (played by Alan Arkin) a semi-retired movie producer. Both are delightfully convincing, providing much needed but always relevant comic relief in the excruciatingly tense atmosphere of the rescue operation. Because Mendez knows that the Iranians will carefully check the background story of the faux Canadians before letting them out of the country, the plan needs real newspaper stories, photographs, and gossip items to back up the story. The job of these Hollywood partners is to convince the movie industry (and most importantly the Hollywood press) that Argo is a real film being readied for production.

 

The section on Chambers’ and Siegel’s sly and silly manipulations of the Hollywood publicity machine lightens the atmosphere and prepares us for the dive back into Iran with Mendez going solo as the “Canadian” foreign service liaison to the film crew. His job is to give the bland and unassuming American embassy workers convincing new identities as Canadian film industry professionals and then take them openly through customs and security checkpoints at the airport to board a plane out of the country under the very noses of the dreaded revolutionary guard.

 

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but Hollywood movies and the Iranian revolution are not just strange, they’re positively weird bedfellows. The wonder is that they work so well together in Argo. Who would have guessed that a political thriller could also encompass the spell that moviemaking casts anywhere in the world? Suspense is the racing heartbeat of any successful caper film, and Argo winds the suspense tighter and tighter as the escape plan encounters, first, resistance from the escapees themselves, and then, a whole series of clever maneuvers by the Iranians to find the Americans, uncover their false identities, and stop them from boarding their plane to Switzerland and freedom.

 

I think Ben Affleck did a marvelous job directing Argo. His camera always shows us what we need to know to further the story and heighten the suspense. The pacing is very quick, and the crowd scenes in particular are frighteningly chaotic.  If the film has any serious shortcoming, it is Affleck’s own performance as Tony Mendez. It’s not a bad performance. He is reasonably convincing as a clever CIA op. But even though the film supplies him with a meager back-story (separated from his wife, misses his kid), we don’t get the feeling that he has a real life outside the frame of the camera. He’s heroic, handsome, and bland. The escapees are similarly nondescript and almost interchangeable, but this works toward making the film seem all the more realistic – that these ordinary people are suddenly caught up in extraordinary circumstances placing them at the center of attention of the entire US Intelligence Service.

 

The threat of horrible violence hangs over the film, but thinking back on it later I believe that in the entire film only one shot is fired and only one person is killed. This single killing seems random at first but plays a key role in the outcome of the escape plan. It’s a tribute to the quality of the screenplay by Chris Terrio that all the details are tied together in an exhilarating climactic encounter at an airport checkpoint where Hollywood science fiction captures the imaginations of young, well-educated Iranian revolutionaries. For a few minutes, these most committed of ideologues are just ordinary young men fascinated by moviemaking.

 

-Mitch Walters