With “Argo,” Ben Affleck has forever demonstrated that he is an extremely skilled director. His acting roles in “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Daredevil” and “Paycheck,” the roles that helped to make him a movie star, appear so far removed from his career these past few years that it seems impossible that these two Afflecks are the same person.
This is because Affleck has become another one of those actors turned directors, and while many actors usually struggle with this transition, Affleck has not.
Centered around the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 that lasted for over a year, the film begins with an informative documentary-esque collection of images and narration that charts Iranian history and U.S.-Iranian relations leading up to the crisis. After the film’s effective history lesson montage of an opening, the story dives right into the day angry Iranian protesters stormed the American embassy and took 52 Americans hostage. However, six Americans escaped the embassy and took refuge in the Canadian ambassador’s home.
Thus, it becomes only a matter of time before the Iranians realize that six Americans are missing (scores of Iranians young and old meticulously piece together shredded documents and photographs to figure this out).
Enter Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), an “exfiltration” specialist who thinks of the best “bad idea” to try to get the six Americans out of Iran: disguise the Americans as members of a Canadian film production called “Argo,” a presumably hack science-fiction Hollywood movie. Obviously, the CIA is not too thrilled with the whole idea, but it is certainly more ideal than having the Americans try and bike hundreds of miles out of the country, one of the other options on the table.
With the help of Hollywood producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and famous makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), Mendez crafts enough publicity for the fake “Argo” movie to travel to Iran to try and do the impossible.
Smartly, Affleck keeps the politics out of his film: he is merely here to tell a richly compelling story, a story so compelling, with a climax so intense it’s almost impossible to believe the events within the film actually happened.
Yet as a director, Affleck excels. The film finds the right balance between all of its elements. The performances are finely tuned and restrained, and the film finds humor in the Siegel-Chambers relationship (the whole Hollywood politics thing is certainly something Affleck knows something about, and he clearly has fun with it).
The film’s production design is top-notch, as Affleck’s film effectively creates a ’70s-vibe throughout. Alexandre Desplat delivers once more with a solid musical score, and Rodrigo Prieto impresses once again with some great cinematography. The film’s editing is a standout component: The crosscutting between the events in the U.S. and Iran creates quite a mountain of tension as the story inches toward its climax.
Perhaps the flaw of “Argo” is its inability to really give its characters much breathing room to develop outside of their limited number of scenes. We rarely have any actual time with the characters, and while Affleck’s character does develop and change for the better, it all feels a little bit too conventional and even hollow by the film’s end.
At its most effective, “Argo” is part throwback to classic Hollywood films of the 1970s (think Sidney Lumet) and part work of an effective craftsman. It is an engaging account of history declassified only 15 years ago. “Argo” shows that Affleck clearly knows how to make a great film, and one shouldn’t be surprised if Affleck receives some recognition for his work during awards season.
