"Argo": B+. By 1979, the Shah of Iran had been ruling his country for over twenty-five years. He had come into power with the assistance of the United States, but the people hated his cruel style of leadership, which included Gestapo-style secret police and harsh punishment for his political foes. Finally, a student-led rebellion ousted the Shah and he fled, dying of cancer, to the US, where he was welcomed by our federal government. Back in Iran, anti-American sentiment fueled by the country's new revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, resulted in the storming of the walled and barricaded American embassy in Tehran, where fifty-two US citizens were imprisoned and held captive. Moments before the siege, six Americans somehow managed to get out to the street, and covertly gained refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador a few miles away. This movie is the story of how the CIA attempted to rescue The Six before the Iranians realized that they were still in Tehran.
Ben Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA troubleshooter who is picked by his boss, Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston), to devise a plan to get The Six out. They are working against the clock, because they correctly predict that the revolutionaries will be able to piece back together the shredded documents in the embassy office and determine that they are six prisoners short. Meanwhile, the Canadian ambassador and his wife are risking their own lives by hiding The Six in their home. If found out, they will be labeled as spies by the revolutionaries and probably summarily and publicly executed along with The Six.
The US Department Of State does not think much of Mendez' seemingly goofy plan to use a phony film project as a subterfuge to get The Six out. His idea is to create fake IDs for The Six, and then pass them off as part of a Canadian film crew which is scouting Tehran for locations for a futuristic sci-fi movie called Argo. (For reasons of clarity, I will call the sci-fi movie Fake Argo.) After discussing alternatives such as using bicycles (rejected due to too much snow and too great a distance from Tehran to the border) or having The Six pose as teachers (rejected because the English school in Tehran had been closed for eight months), one State Department honcho concedes to Mendez, "All of the rescue ideas are bad, but yours is the least bad."
In order to convince the Iranians that the film project is legit, Mendez enlists the support of Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who in turn talks director Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) into signing on. As is usually the case with those two actors, they bring the story up a notch by supplying humor (among other things) to counterbalance the otherwise dramatic unfolding of the plot. Chambers and Siegel use their Hollywood connections to get story boards, posters, press releases and other film production paraphernalia created for Mendez to take with him to Tehran to give Fake Argo indices of authenticity and legitimacy.
The bulk of Argo shows how Mendez' steady hand and fearlessness gives The Six their chance to escape. None of The Six knows the first thing about filmmaking, and they aren't too sure that Mendez' plan won't be suicidal. Mendez convinces them that his plan is their only chance to get out of Iran alive, so they must learn their roles, not to mention their new fake identities and background bios as they appear on their phony Canadian passports. Affleck, who also directed this movie, does a credible job as Mister Cool, Calm & Collected, which was probably Mendez' demeanor in real life. The scenes shift from revolutionary headquarters to Washington, DC, to the hostages held captive in the US embassy, to the Canadian ambassador's home which is functioning as the hideout of The Six. The tension mounts and the clock is ticking, because the revolutionaries start to piece things together.
The denouement, unfortunately, is a little beyond the scope of reason and believability, but I chose not to let that interfere with my overall enjoyment of the movie. (It is the first movie I attended in almost a month!) Another minor irritation is that I enjoyed most of the songs, including tracks by Dire Straits and Van Halen, but too many of them did not relate to what was happening on the screen. It's almost as if the film's music director picked a few of his favorite classic rock gems at random. Finally, the sound bite spin by former President Jimmy Carter during the closing credits regarding the fifty-two hostages (who were held for 444 days and were not released until Carter's term as President expired) is both laughable and inaccurate. I guess the man could not face the truth.
Ironically, even though Fake Argo was a fictitious film, the concept of which was created soley as a ruse to rescue The Six, their story is based on fact. The taking of the US embassy occurred in 1979, but the details surrounding the story of The Six never came to light until they were de-classified by President Clinton in 1994. I have always admired the Canadian people. Now having watched Argo, I like them even more.
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I'd like to know the accuracy of the events in the denouement. I assume they're far from accurate. This, in addition to the lack of interest in the father/son/mom relationship was enough to downgrade the film to a B+ for me, too.
ReplyDeleteI loved the history lesson in the film. I didn't know anything about these six Americans. Perhaps my favorite part of the film, though--and I know this doesn't say much about the film, but I found it to be the most interesting--was the prologue. The history leading up to the storming of the embassy was fascinating. I remember learning about the nationalizing of Iranian oil, but I think I forgot how much the US screwed the country over prior to this. It's just another example of our country giving solid reasons to our "enemies" for hating us.