"Argo" - Film Review

The premise to Argo seems almost too absurd to be true: when 6 members of the U.S. Embassy in Iran manage to escape before the takeover, they hideout at the Canadian ambassador’s house; CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), when all other options seem impossible, comes up with the idea of faking the film production of a science fiction film and using location scouting in Iran for the fake film as a way to extricate them from the country. It almost sounds like the type of historical re-imagination one would expect in a film like Inglourious Basterds, not a historical drama. As Bryan Cranston’s Jack O’Donnell puts it though, “It’s the best bad idea we have”. It’s a footnote of history only brought to light in recent years when the incident was declassified under the Clinton administration, and it adds a new element to the already deeply fraught Iranian hostage crisis.

The film details just how desperate the CIA and the U.S. government had become that they would even consider such a crazy option. And even harder still at times, how to make a fake production of a film come off as real. But the film handles its historical drama well, balancing the tension between entertaining and informing (and the last twenty minutes of the film are totally plausible and yet all the more intensely nerve-racking for it). 

Ben Affleck really has made a turn in his career in about the last 5 years. Affleck had made a fairly big name for himself, but he had done little to suggest large credibility. His career had been mostly consigned to bad or forgettable movies (forgiving a Good Will Hunting here or there). But then he wrote, and directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town, two really good movies that seemed to usher in a new phase in his career. Argo is another solid film to add to his resume. It’s efficiently, tightly directed and moves with precision and a sense of purpose. It has nice, even lavish, period detail but doesn’t get bogged down in historical particularities. It’s intense without forcing intensity. Argo is what a historical drama ought to be: informative, but lacking obsession with the fact that it’s doing so, and entertaining, but without having to massively fudge historical accuracy. 

Grade: B+