Ben Affleck is endearing. The movies he has directed so far - Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo - have all reached excellent standards of film making. He seems to move from strength to strength and Argo, despite all the cinematic constraints that go with translating a complex international issue from paper onto the silver screen within 120 minutes and trying to keep it engaging but not populist, manages to make a mark. It takes a lot of clarity and a top class team to film retrospectively about important issues that really happened, reconstructing scenes from photographs, recordings and research, getting the sequences straight in their own heads and then extracting performances from different actors with their own personalities and styles and making it fit into the particular situation, a hostage crisis in this case. Ben Affleck manages to do that well and in his capacity as an actor, he displays restraint and as a director, resourcefulness.
The effort has been to deal with the hostage crisis as such and stay away from debates of the right and wrong of the Iranian revolution itself or the moral culpabilities of the Cold war era U.S government and the Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged under Ayotollah Khomeini. Affleck has a lot to pack in the two hours and he does so with style. The dialogues are one of the best elements in the film and their delivery by the cast is timed and measured in a way that it puts those wonderful lines right into context. The casual rogue humour of Hollywood filmdom and Washington bureaucracy combine to conceive Mission Argo, so to speak, and the characters from both these worlds, with a glass of whisky in their hands, come up the clinching line of the movie - 'Argo fuck yourself.' That line packs the nonchalance of both the worlds, the daredevilness of the operation, the panache of the persons involved and even a philosphical detachment from the result and a disenchantment with heroism.
Middle eastern style music in some scenes adds to the effect of the credible sets of revolutionary Iran. The persian-esque music during scenes where the flight takes off from U.S to Iran and when Ben Affleck (Tony Mendez) changes into a blue shirt after a sleepless night to call on the 6 Americans gives an almost physical jerk and draws the viewer all the more powerfully into the plot. The actors have all performed well, Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel especially delivers a riveting performance. He times his dialogues, beautifully cheeky dialogues, with an uncanny finesse. The scene where he negotiates with a director to sign him for Argo is immensely enjoyable and the smile it produces gets revived in the viewer's lips whenever he comes before the camera. It was a smile expecting a shrewd humourous line and also noddingly acknowledging the sharp spontaneity of his behaviour and therefore making readymade allowances for its wit.
The climax is highly cinematised yet Ben Affleck, the director easily steals the show and wins over the audience primarily because he avoids taking sides and his own character in the film, that of exfil specialist Tony Mendez, calls a spade a spade and comes across as a man of action and pragmatism rather than of eloquence and charm.
Argo - must watch - 8/10
