The whole setup is so wacky and improbable that it can only dovetail into one thing: it could be true. Or as true as a Hollywood movie could get. In order to save six Americans during the Teheran hostage crisis, the CIA sends in an agent posing as a sci-fi film producer looking for a location. He'd breeze into Iran, kiss the ring of Khomeini's culture minister, and rescue the six, not sneaking or smuggling them out, but waltzing them through the falcon-grip of a tightly surveilled airport with legit boarding passes.
Ben Affleck, standing, plays a CIA agent posing as a film producer.
It's more than just a based-on-a-true story brag; this is a based-on-a-true-declassified-CIA-operation kept under wraps for nearly two decades until President Bill Clinton allowed it to be made public. And hats off to Argo, a taut, clever new film directed by and starring Ben Affleck, for deftly, constructing historical realism five minutes into the narrative and locking us into that frantic period of 1979 _ the period where we watch the Khomeini-Carter horn-locking on television and wonder if history, real history that's taking place somewhere on Earth, is always grainy and comes with a narration as it does on TV.
The opening sets the tone that makes what follows, however insane, work. We see an animated montage that condenses Iran's history into a curtain-raising capsule: Persia, ruled by kings for 2,500 years elects a socialist, Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister in 1951, much to the ire of the Brits and Americans, who engineer a military coup that re-installs a corrupt Shah to power.
It is followed by the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini who, counting beads and evoking God, turns the tables and ousts the Shah, who flees to the US.
At this point, Argo expertly strings real news footage with re-enactment _ one shot real, the next restaged, back and forth, almost imperceptibly (notice the size of the frame) _ to set up the central conflict of the film: Iranian protesters, demanding that US President Jimmy Carter extradite the Shah, storm the US embassy in Teheran, setting off a protracted hostage crisis that would last 444 days.
During the melee, six American employees slip out of the embassy and hide at the residence of the Canadian ambassador. After considering various alternatives, all improbable, the CIA gives the green light, grudgingly, to "the best bad idea" code-named the Hollywood option: They build an elaborate cover and pose an agent, Tony Mendes (Affleck), as a film producer who wants to shoot a sci-fi movie in Teheran _ called Argo. The fake film is supposed to be one of those trashy, low-budget, early-'80s exotica featuring monsters and princesses in a desert, a post-Star Wars kitsche with a pre-Star Wars technology.
To make it all convincing, Mendes _ Affleck sporting a beard and lugubrious manners _ needs the help of John Chambers (John Goodman, beaming), a real-life prosthetics artist and Oscar winner, and of Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), a real Hollywood producer. They set up a phony film company, call a press conference, plant news in trade papers, and do what Hollywood always does best: beating pots and pans about an epic new movie, only that this one will never get made. What Argo sees and understands is that the espionage business and the Hollywood business aren't that different. They involve lies, impersonations, bluffing on a ridiculous scale, and expensive machinations to pull off a suspension of disbelief, even for a short while, and usually to an international audience.
Affleck, directing from the script by Chris Terrio and Joshuah Bearman, nimbly mixes political intrigue with comedy; and while the film is a tense rescue operation (without guns), what makes it best is its good-humoured jibe at both the US State Department and Hollywood sleaze.
Affleck is a Democrat; he said recently that Mitt Romney didn't stand a chance at presidency. Argo tries best at the precarious act of balancing _ that religious hawk Ayatollah Khomeini still stares down from posters and his revolutionary supporters can still be buffoons, but the folly and selfishness of the American policy are reported, as well as the quip about Hollywood's tasteless Orientalism.
It's still a tale of American heroism, it's a cinch, though the film defers Mendes's heroic certification to the final minutes, and in a quiet and much more dignified way than, say, Affleck's turn as Capt Rafe McCawley in the odious Pearl Harbor. History is not a nationalistic music video, as that dumb 2001 film seems to believe, but it's something, as Affleck shows us in Argo, you can look back at with grit-teeth _ and a wink.
In Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, a fictitious movie-within-a-movie alters the course of history, rending it fictitious too. The cheerful cynicism about the power of cinema is much less potent in Argo, and here it's not the inherent, metaphysical character of movies that affects the people but the smoke, the dry-ice, and the reputation of marines that precedes any Hollywood execs.
Argo ends with an efficiently paced climax when Mendes and the six other Americans try to board a flight out of Teheran, but in the real CIA file which you can look up on the CIA website, there's no drama and excitement. It's a movie after all, and yet we're glad to see that.
