Argo
I hear we're looking into some sort about a meth lab...
Grade: A –
Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan
Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr.
Of
all the indelible images in Argo—blindfolded
American hostages; burning U.S. flags—perhaps the most jarring is a shot of a
ramshackle Hollywood sign circa the 1970s, three of its whitewashed lettering gone
and the rest well into decay. The thing is the landmark was actually restored
to its once and present form in 1978, a full year before Islamist militants
stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and triggered the Iran hostage crisis, the
setting for the film. The question of why director Ben Affleck would include
such a patently anachronistic visual goes to the heart of why he made Argo.
While
Iranian students and other extremists took 52 Americans hostage, six others managed
to slip away while the embassy was being raided and took sanctuary in the home
of the Canadian ambassador, unbeknownst to anyone except the upper reaches of
the U.S. and Canadian governments and their intelligence services. With the
clock ticking until the group’s inevitable discovery, CIA exfiltration expert
Tony Mendez (Affleck) concocts a cover story to ferry the stranded diplomats
out. Drawing from the popularity of sci-fi cinema in the wake of Star Wars, Mendez develops an elaborate
back-story involving a fake film project titled “Argo,” a ostensible science
fiction flick with a Middle-Eastern flavor looking to film at locations inside
Iran. Working with a venerable Hollywood director (Alan Arkin, terrific) and
make-up artist (John Goodman) to lend credence to the Wag the Dog ruse, Mendez flies to Tehran armed with fake Canadian
passports and dossiers assigning each of the six diplomats their role in a
Canadian film crew that Mendez hopes he will fly to freedom.
For
his third directorial effort, Affleck graduates from well-crafted genre
pictures (The Town; Gone Baby Gone) to more formidable
filmmaking. Argo is narratively taut
and efficient in its composition. A prologue ably summarizes America’s
contribution to the Islamic uprising and its anger towards the U.S., seguing
into a white-knuckle rendering of the storming of the embassy. The rest of the
film conveys both the inanity and bravery on display in freeing the band of
terrified, stranded diplomats.
Affleck
manages the difficult task of maintaining tension throughout a story with a
known outcome. Like the rescued Americans, the audience doesn’t feel relief
until their plane clears hostile airspace. Still, Affleck doesn’t overly wallow
in any single crisis, and there’s no bureaucratic snafu that can’t be resolved
with a couple of phone calls and some vociferous theatrics.
The
director’s primary interest lies more in the context of these events, not
their mere recounting. You don’t have to buy into Reagan’s vision of “Morning
in America” rising just over the horizon to acknowledge that Argo takes place at a crossroads for
both America as a whole and the movie industry, a junction point between a
period of decline and the revitalization poised to follow. The hostage crisis capped
a tumultuous time for the U.S., over a decade of political assassinations,
social unrest, war in Vietnam, Watergate and economic calamity. Likewise, that
derelict Hollywood sign embodies the ebb of the once renowned studio system. Repeated
references to Star Wars as the
harbinger for a new crop of sci-fi scripts—and a reference point making a
B-movie project like Mendez’s Argo more
believable—is quite deliberate. Principal shooting of George Lucas’ modern
blockbuster took place in Tunisia and England, not the Hollywood back lots.
Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic after discovering that 20th
Century Fox’s visual effects department had been disbanded.
Only
truth could justify a script in which an audience is asked to believe that in
the midst of a radical religious revolution in which individual liberties are
being suppressed, dissidents are being hanged in the street and Americans are
being kidnapped en masse could a group of white filmmakers (Canadian or
otherwise) be allowed passage and access to scout the Grand Bazaar in Tehran as
a possible shooting locale. For Affleck, Argo
isn’t just an ode to American heroism. It’s a salute to its most durable,
exportable commodity: movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment