Part of the great power of movies is the medium's ability to bring to life some of the biggest moments in world history. These stories enthrall the viewer as they sit and watch the events unfurl through an intense secondhand experience. If the viewer is watching a film about an event that they were not alive to see, the film will present itself as a rich opportunity to learn something new.
Ben Affleck makes a meteoric return as a director for his tension-drenched thriller, Argo. As he tells the true story of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, he builds upon relentless suspense as the danger for the main characters becomes more life-threatening. With this only being his third feature as a director, he hasn't just given audiences one of the best movies of the year, but has already become one of the most gifted filmmakers of today.
During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a group of revolutionaries breaks into the U.S. embassy in Tehran in retaliation for the support the country gives to their recently deposed Shah. While many of the staff is taken as hostages, six are able to escape and find refuge in the home of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). Back in the U.S., CIA specialist Tony Mendez (Affleck) is brought in to review the plans to save the six hostages, but sees that they are flawed. After he watches Battle of the Planet of the Apes on TV, he hatches an idea: go into Tehran and pose with the hostages as a Canadian film crew that is scouting the area for exotic locations for a fake sci-fi movie called Argo. After the CIA agrees to it, Tony will need all the resources and support he can get from his job and from Hollywood in order to get the hostages home alive.
Affleck not only proves that he's a supremely competent filmmaker, but also continues to show that he can provide some quality acting as well. When The Town was released in 2010, which Affleck directed, he presented to audiences that he can be as good of an actor as he can a director, and with his role in Argo, he delivers his best performance to date.
His character has a pinpoint focus of what he must do to accomplish his mission. Even though he has some personal issues with being away from his family because he and his spouse are taking a break, there isn't one spot in the film where Affleck's character wallows in a woe-is-me mentality. He concentrates on his mission with a towering willpower to go and follow through with his task. Despite his determination to do what he can for the hostages, Tony doesn't make overblown speeches about what is the right thing to do in the hostage situation. It's an understated performance, with Tony acting composed in each scene, trying to figure out how to go about each step in the rescue.
Argo's supporting cast is one of the most memorable this year. John Goodman portrays famed Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers, who also crafted disguises at one point for the CIA. Alan Arkin plays a big-shot film producer named Lester Siegel, who has the know-how and connections for show business. They both have some of the film's funniest quotes, such as Lester's "You're worried about the Ayatollah? Try the WGA," and John's "You could teach a rhesus monkey to be a director in a day." The two speak their humorous lines with great timing. As the tension is boiling over, either of these two characters are there to utter a funny line, even if it just calms the audience down for a little bit, but the humor doesn't become too much that it undermines the serious tone. Bryan Cranston is fierce as Mendez's supervisor, Jack O'Donnell. He takes charge of every scene he's in and dominates them with his get-the-job-done persona.
Although the actors used for the six hostages have appeared in other projects, they are still relatively unknown to most audiences, but the film benefits from that aspect. This makes their scenes look and feel more realistic with how they portray their characters. Otherwise, it would have been distracting to have familiar actors fill those roles. This makes them look more like ordinary people who are trying to get back home. When they interact with one another, the audience also learns some details about how their lives were before they ended up in this crisis. So, the viewers are able to care about them.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how it begins and ends by showing storyboards. I won't give away how they are used in the end, but in the beginning, the storyboards are used to illustrate the history of Iran and the reasons behind the revolution. It's a smart use for them because this is a movie about a fake movie that was, basically, the vessel that got the hostages and Mendez through Iran to safety. Also, storyboards factor greatly into one of the most significant scenes of the film's climax.
One thing that's always impressive about film is how archival footage can be found and used to strengthen the storytelling. News footage is employed extensively throughout Argo. By having the footage embedded in the film, the audience is able to feel closer to the events. When viewing this footage, it provides the sense of watching the news from a television at home, but the audience is also watching the actual planning and events of the rescue as they unfold, something they couldn't have done when all of this happened when it did.
The screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on Mendez's book Master of Disguise and Joshuah Bearman's Wired magazine article The Great Escape, includes wonderfully developed characters throughout, and are all the more impressive because they are real. His story is shrouded in tension, which is one of the film's best qualities. But, the moments of humor he writes between Affleck, Goodman and Arkin break that tension, albeit for a little while, in the amusing scenes of them trying to get the rescue plan together.
George Clooney and Grant Heslov are producers for the film, and both worked on other films that have dealt heavily with politics such as 2005's Good Night, and Good Luck and last year's The Ides of March. Their experience with political films is clearly seen in Argo, the subject matter being a perfect fit for these two and Affleck and their political and filmmaking savvy.
Ben Affleck is a master of creating suspenseful scenarios in his films such as Gone Baby Gone and The Town. For Argo, he achieves a remarkable feat: being able to instill near-unbearable anxiety into the story, even though the viewer already knows the outcome. There are two particular scenes that come to mind: one is where his character must drive the group of hostages in a van through a group of protesters, and the other involves the group traversing through a bazaar as they pretend to be scouting for filming locations. Both scenes emit a potent sense of claustrophobia. The van scene mostly has the camera inside the vehicle as the hostages are looking out the windows while trying not to look terrified as the protesters surround them. The scene in the bazaar has the audience even more anxious as it watches the hostages and Mendez weaving through the densely populated streets, and what happens in this scene really gets the heart racing.
With just a three-movie history as a director, Affleck has made a superb impression on cinema. He has stayed consistent with his excellence in storytelling, and is reliable in bringing audiences films that achieve on placing viewers as close to edge as possible as they wait for the many high-tension situations to unfold. This film is his greatest success in filmmaking so far, and he gets better each time. Put him in the director's chair, and Affleck will give us something worth raving about. In this case, it's the utterly stimulating Argo.
Final grade: A
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