Six American diplomats escape the Iranian takeover of America's embassy in 1979. While the world focuses on the greater hostage crisis, CIA extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) focuses on rescuing these six from the Canadian embassy. His plan: disguise the hostages as a Canadian film crew scouting locations in Iran. This involves convincing Hollywood producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and makeup man John Chambers (John Goodman) to manufacture Argo, a science fiction epic with a screenplay, advertisements and even a press event. The early stages work flawlessly, but indecision by the hostages, executive meddling and suspicious Iranians make their getaway no easy task.
Like Charlie Wilson's War, Argo's covert ops are an expose reshaped as farce. Hollywood (or at least a chunk of it) is shown in bed with the US government, who engineer a dummy film with no one batting an eye. At the end, when higher-ups call off the plan, Mendez disobeys orders, short-circuiting the whole chain of command. At the end, the CIA successfully covers its tracks, allowing Canada to take credit. Beyond a fleeting reference to the Mossadegh coup, Affleck opts not to probe the story's darker implications.
And why should he? The story's mix of farce and derring-do deserves celebration. Affleck and writer Chris Terrio provide a perfect balancing act, mixing satire with thrills. The Hollywood scenes crackle with pointed barbs, with Siegel and Chambers using bluff and guile to arrange a "fake hit." The best scene has Siegel confronting a hack screenwriter whose value is exponentially inflated by the crisis. Unionized and cliquish Hollywood proves thornier than the Ayatollah's regime.
Argo flawlessly shifts gears in the second half. We get glimpses of Iranian repression to raise the stakes, while early exposition establishes the Carter Administration's uneasiness with Mendez's plan. Afraid of an embarrassing catastrophe, the State Department nearly scrubs Mendez's plan. The last half hour is an exercise in tension, with brilliant inter-cutting between the hostages's escape, bureaucratic muddle and near-misses with Iranian authorities. It's amazingly gripping, so intense that the sappy finale barely registers.
Ben Affleck's wooden acting isn't too big a drawback: playing an intense G-Man minimizes his woodenness. John Goodman and Alan Arkin are perfectly cast as archly cynical movie big shots: their scenes are alone worth the ticket price. Bryan Cranston gets a meaty role as Mendez's boss. The excellent supporting cast includes Victor Garber, Bob Gunton, Phillip Baker Hall, Zeljko Ivanek, Titus Welliver and Isabelle Adjani.
Argo is a resounding success. It proves again that Ben Affleck should stay behind the camera instead of take up space in front of it.
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