Argo

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 27, 2012.

Based on a true story, Ben Affleck's third feature as director gives new meaning to the term “Hollywood escapism”.  During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, rebels took over the American embassy in Tehran, holding the staff hostage.  Six escaped and found a haven in the home of the Canadian ambassador, while the State Department pondered how to get them back to the US. 

Finally a CIA operative named Tony Mendez, played here by Affleck himself, hit on an audacious plan.  He would enter Iran in the guise of a Canadian producer scouting locations for a Star Wars rip-off (here called Argo) and supply his fellow Americans with fake travel documents letting them pose as members of the crew. To corroborate their claims, reports about the upcoming production were planted in the trades, and a couple of Hollywood insiders were enlisted, including the make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) who won an Oscar for his work on Planet of the Apes.

In the hands of, say, David O. Russell, this would be a perfect set-up for a screwball farce, mingling deadly serious politics with the innate frivolity of putting on a show.  What if the screenwriter of the film-within-the-film were as crazy as the writer of Springtime For Hitler in The Producers?  Or what if one of the Iranian officials duped by Mendez turned out to be a closet Hollywood buff with showbiz ambitions of his own? 

Sadly, such possibilities are left untouched.  Chris Terrio's workmanlike screenplay sticks to the outline of actual events, while Affleck's unimaginative visual choices (desaturated colours, long lenses) seem meant to signify both “realism” and a received idea of 1970s cinema.  If anything, he overdoes surface fidelity to the period, inviting us to groove throughout on chunky glasses, luxuriant facial hair and wide lapels.  His worst decision of all was to cast himself in the lead role: even aside from his implausibility as a Latino, he shows no trace of con-man flair, frowning morosely behind his heavy beard.

Occasionally the film detours to contemplate Mendez's relationship with his estranged wife (Taylor Schilling) and young son (Aidan Sussman): another set of allusions to 1970s convention, this time to the “troubled nuclear family” trope found in films from Kramer Vs Kramer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It's predictable that a phone conversation with his son inspires Mendez's "fake movie" brainwave, no less so that the mechanically suspenseful climax ends in Spielbergian schmaltz: hugs all round, the American flag flying high.

Earlier on, there are traces of a more critical point of view.  A prologue explains that the US was largely responsible for the 1953 coup d'état against Iran's democratically elected government – and hence must bear some blame for everything that followed. The Star Wars references not only recall the name given in the 1980s to Ronald Reagan's mooted missile defence program, but also hark back to The Men Who Stare At Goats, a more pointedly satirical docudrama which mocks the wistful thinking that sees American military power as benign (both films were produced by Smoke House Pictures, the company owned by George Clooney with Goats director Grant Heslov).

Alongside the heroic narrative runs a vein of wisecracking humour implying, rather too glibly, that politics and showbiz are equivalent scams.  Watching Iranian protests on TV, Mendez wonders if these, too, are staged for the cameras.  When he plans to come to Hollywood and behave like a big shot producer without actually making anything, he's told that he'll fit right in.

But only two scenes do more than hint at the poetic potential of the premise. In the first, Iranian customs inspectors peer curiously at storyboards prepared for the non-existent Argo.  We're left to wonder if these fanciful images of desert battles resonate with them on some level – or if they're merely amused at the Western taste for juvenile fantasy. The second scene is the epilogue, with factual captions superimposed on shots of Star Wars action figures in the bedroom of Mendez's son. The Jedi Knights and stormtroopers have a kind of pathos, as if aware they could never exist outside of a boyish dream – which in retrospect is perhaps what Argo has been all along.