Argo

Argo, Ben Affleck’s third film as a director, amazes less than his wonderful debut, Gone Baby Gone, but it's a step up from his solid, if unremarkable, sophomore effort The Town. This makes Affleck a fairly solid three for three; an undeniably talented and important director in the ever-diminishing class of studio filmmakers still making mid-budget movies for adults. Argo tells the formerly classified story of a minor footnote in the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, wherein the CIA and Canadian government devised a fantastically far-fetched mission in an attempt to rescue six US diplomats who were not part of the main group of Americans held by Iran for 444 days.

Affleck plays Tony Mendez, the CIA operative who devised a plan to smuggle out the six endangered diplomats by having them pose as a Canadian film crew, backed with Hollywood money, scouting locations in Iran for a low-budget Star Wars knock-off. This premise is so sensational that it is practically impossible for the film to live up to it, but Affleck and writer Chris Terrio handle the material deftly. The film takes many liberties with the facts, but in doing so manages to convey how this daring escape plan must have felt from the inside. True, Affleck and Terrio don't make the story as riveting as Alan J. Pakula and William Goldman might have back in the 70s, but this is still one of the best films I've seen all year, and in the current drought of intelligent, adult, Hollywood entertainment, I'll count my blessings.

Affleck doesn't recreate the look and feel of 1970s-era-filmmaking as perfectly as David Fincher did in his 2007 film Zodiac, but he comes damn close. For instance, the film thrillingly opens with the old “rolling W” Warner Bros. logo of the late 70s and early '80s and its titles are subtlety speckled with dirt and scratches as if watching an old, but well preserved, 35mm print. The casting, costumes, and décor are excellent, and the presentation of the decoy movie's production seems ridiculous but is not at all exaggerated from the realities of the time. The exposition of how and why the operation needed a real movie property to be credible, and how the “Argo” script was selected, is particularly well-handled.

Much of today’s movie-going public probably doesn’t remember the Iranian hostage crisis, and a movie like this, simple and fictionalized though it may be, is a great way to stoke the public’s interest in recent history, something that is well within cinema's power to accomplish but something movies don't do often enough anymore. Argo is the kind of film I wish Hollywood would make more often. It’s a highly satisfying entertainment—a real-life version of the Inglourious Basterds’ Operation Kino!

POSTSCRIPT: While this was hardly my favorite film (or even my favorite nominated film) of the year, I was thrilled to see Argo win the Best Picture Oscar as well as a king’s ransom of other big awards, and to perform so well at the box office. If there is one thing I’d like to see next year it’s more films like Agro. When I was growing up in the late 70s and early 80s Hollywood made 7 or 8 films like Argo—smart entertainments aimed at people over 30—every year. Now we are lucky to get one every 2 years. If Argo (and the other 8 Oscar nominated best pictures for that matter) set a trend of wooing the over 25-year-old-demographic back tot he cinema I will be one happy film nerd!