Ben Affleck (2012)
For much of Argo, there’s a disappointing lack of traction between the political suspense and the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction Hollywood aspects of the film. This is the story of how the CIA planned, and accomplished, the rescue from Iran in early 1980 of six American nationals who’d escaped from the US Embassy in Tehran – when it was stormed by an angry crowd in November 1979 – to take refuge in the neighbouring Canadian Embassy. (Fifty-six other embassy workers remained as hostages until 20 January 1981: the Ayatollah Khomeini’s determination to humiliate Jimmy Carter to the end saw the hostages released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President.) The CIA pretended that Tony Mendez, the agent in charge of the rescue operation, and these six ‘house guests’ of the Canadian ambassador were in Iran scouting locations for an Oriental-flavoured sci-fi movie called ‘Argo’. As well as false identity papers and Canadian passports, story-boards and publicity for the movie were produced, for use both in Tehran and back in Burbank, California. Ben Affleck, working from a screenplay by Chris Terrio (based on a 2007 Wired article, ‘How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran’, and Antonio Mendez’s memoir The Master of Disguise), sets up the situation with a potted explanation of the political history of Iran up to and including 1979. This prologue is informative but far from zippy; Affleck’s staging of the invasion of the American Embassy is nothing special either. Although it’s never boring to watch, Argo is unsatisfying. This is one occasion when you feel that a film’s being based on a true story really ought to count for something. The movie should feel unique yet it’s political thriller boilerplate, made with a good deal more proficiency than imagination.
In the last half hour or so, however, Argo catches fire and I don’t think it’s simply because this is the climax of the rescue plot. When Mendez and his team check in at Tehran airport there are no seats for them on the Swiss Air flight they’re planning to take to freedom. The CIA has decided at the eleventh hour to abandon the rescue but Mendez refuses to accept orders and heads for the airport with his precious cargo anyway. President Carter’s renewed authorisation of the plan comes through in the nick of time: when the check-in girl looks again for reservations on the plane they’ve materialised. The group’s progress through the airport is then interrupted by an aggressively suspicious security guard. His interrogation is frightening partly because of the force of the actor playing the guard (he could be one of several names in the IMDB cast list). It’s also partly because the guard’s questions are in Farsi and there are no subtitles on the screen: the cinema audience is as helpless in the face of this incomprehensible grilling as the Americans actually on the receiving end of it (all but one of them, anyway – the one who understands the language). Mendez gives the security guard a business card for the pretend film production company and asks him to call Hollywood to verify the travellers’ credentials. Affleck cuts to Burbank and we watch the two men whom Mendez is relying on to take the call being delayed on a studio floor; the phone rings and rings in an empty room. Just as the guard is about to hang up, the phone is picked up by the right person. The guard’s questioning at the heart of these sequences has a documentary reality and grip that’s been missing until this point in the movie. Before and after it are moments of considerable suspense that are not only hard to credit but which seem to be required elements in any fictional escape story worth its salt. Because so much of what’s gone before is unimaginative I’m not wholly convinced that the combination of these two elements is fully intentional but it’s certainly effective. It makes you feel this whole thing really happened at the same time that it expresses the crucial importance of Hollywood unreality in the rescue. It’s when Argo is most real and at its most excitingly contrived that the movie is truest to its subject.
Ben Affleck’s decision to cast himself in the lead role of Mendez was a mistake. He’s minimally expressive and not a good enough actor to show anything going on behind the blank face and dead eyes. The house guests, like the movie, take a long time to engage our sympathies but they’re gradually persuasive: Scoot McNairy is the standout but all the others – Kerry Bishe, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Tate Donovan and Clea DuVall – do well too. It’s not surprising that, back in Hollywood, John Goodman as John Chambers (the Oscar-winning make-up artist who is Mendez’s first contact there) and Alan Arkins as a film producer called Lester Siegel (a composite figure) have more fun than anyone in Iran or at CIA headquarters (where Bryan Cranston is Mendez’s boss). Goodman and Arkin have the best lines and make the most of them. It’s amazing how much comic mileage there turns out to be in the characters’ shared catch phrase ‘Argo fuck yourself’: Arkin’s exultant delivery of these words the last time we hear them is especially enjoyable. The momentum of the climax to Argo is just about irresistible. It nearly survives even the lame happy ending of Tony Mendez, whose marriage was on the rocks and who’d moved out of the family home, returning to his wife and son. During the airport sequence, the security guard flicks through a Hollywood trade paper. This includes an article headed ‘Argo To Start Filming in March’ and a photograph of Meryl Streep in a still from Kramer vs Kramer – a reminder of what was actually big in the American film industry at the time. The shot at the end of Argo of Tony Mendez reunited with his son is (I assume inadvertently) reminiscent of the ending of Kramer vs Kramer. Ben Affleck redeems himself with a more pertinent summation of the story that he’s told as the camera moves along the rows of Star Wars figures in Mendez’s son’s bedroom.
10 November 2012
