Argo and see it

Not many movies can make the CIA look like the good guys. Ben Affleck’s Argo does, but not without first pointing out how the CIA installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to rule over Iran for 30 years, sparking an Islamic revolt under the Ayatollah Khomeini — which then led to the hostage crisis forming the backdrop of Argo’s story. So the CIA had its good moments, amid many bad ones.

Argo is one of those word-of-mouth hits. People might not expect a drama about a hostage rescue mission to be as funny as it is tense and gripping. Affleck has grown into a real director, and he brings this shaggy dog story home with great style. He plays Tony Mendez, a CIA extraction expert who helps free six Americans who’ve escaped the besieged US embassy in Tehran and are hiding out at the Canadian embassy there. With his 1979 beard and diet of cigarettes and scotch, he seems more subdued than usual. Not the hotshot heist leader he played in his last film, Town, but a CIA operative whose facial expression barely registers a flicker of change. You could call that “range,” in Affleck’s case. His character Mendez needs to keep things down-low and hush-hush, after all, so a minimal performance makes sense.

Argo’s success is aided by a lot of things, not least of all the sparks provided by two veteran actors, John Goodman and Alan Arkin, playing makeup artist John Chambers and producer Lester Siegel, respectively. These two buy into Affleck’s fantasy of devising a “fake Star Wars rip-off” that he can use as a pretext for collecting the Americans — part of his “crew” — and tiptoe out of Iran. When the movie pivots from its tense Iranian documentary-feel opening back to Hollywood, things lighten up: Siegel and Chambers help to devise posters, storyboards and find a script: they settle on a space opera set on a planet with an “exotic Middle Eastern feel” and start working up their pitch. To make it even more convincing, they announce an open reading in Variety: the scene turns into a Comic-Con sideshow, with every wookie and his mother showing up for the Hollywood casting call. One reporter asks what the title of the script, Argo, means. Siegel, who can’t summon the plot points of a script he’s barely read, quips “Argo f**k yourself.” That becomes the catchphrase of the movie.

The third locale is the CIA headquarters, where Middle East chief Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) greenlights the “Argo” rescue mission and hand-wrings every step of the way as Affleck collects six Canadian passports in Istanbul, applies for a filming permit in Tehran, and starts trying to convince his hidden Americans to become very good actors very quickly before the Shiite militia discover their true identities.

The suspense is crazy good in Argo, in an age where we’ve been conditioned that movie suspense equals action, car chases, machine-gun bursts. It doesn’t. It involves us knowing something that the characters either know or don’t know, and feeling incredible tension because of it. Hitchcock would be proud of Affleck on this one.

Mixing grim stock footage with even grittier reconstructions of the ’79 Iranian Revolution, Affleck creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable oppression. Showing your Western face on the streets of Tehran is almost suicidal. Every flick of the eye could spell death. Meanwhile, 52 US hostages remained in terrorist hands in the US embassy for 444 days.

Argo bases its “true story” on two book sources (The Master of Disguise and The Great Escape), but it’s worth noting that, to Canadians who hosted the six Americans in Tehran and helped facilitate their transfer to Canada, this episode of history is known as “The Canadian Caper.” Affleck has defended the Hollywood interpretation of events, saying, hey, Argo is “based” on a true story, not “this is a true story.” And truth is often crazier than fiction. Sharing some of its absurdity with the political satire Wag the Dog, Affleck’s film is more compelling because, in its bare-bone details, it actually happened. And let’s face it: pretending to film a fake sci-fi film in Iran as a ruse to free hostages makes for a better story.

The tonal shifts between comedy and searing tension are handled deftly; otherwise this would be a grim caper, indeed. (Even the soundtrack music shifts according to mood: as the six Americans bunker down in the Canadian embassy, someone drops a needle on Led Zeppelin’s heavy track, When the Levee Breaks; when sci-fi geeks gather outside the Beverly Hilton, it’s Van Halen’s loose and lubricious Dance the Night Away playing in the background.) For the finale, Affleck ratchets up the suspense to the breaking point, and does it all with very few guns fired, and not an explosion in sight.

One standout is Scoot McNairy as Joe Stafford, one of the six Americans who initially refuses to go along with Affleck’s plan. He thinks it’s suicide to try to pass themselves off as movie people, but reluctantly he gives in; and when push comes to shove at the Tehran airport, and the AK-47s are jutting in their faces, he does this incredible turn, explaining the fake storyboards to Iranian security in whiz-bang detail, all the while speaking in Farsi, and you begin to understand that this is a movie about Hollywood as much as it is the CIA or Iran; it’s a movie about a pitch, and how to sell that pitch.