Review: Ben Affleck's Argo

Review: Argo

Don’t worry, ardent fans of Ben Affleck’s chest and stomach: despite the somewhat somber tone of much of Argo, he does still manage to take his shirt off.

Not that you’d’ve been wrong to have been worried: Affleck’s playing Tony Mendez, real-life C.I.A. spook and master of disguise, a role a little bit off-set from the normal steamy hunk stuff that normally has him disrobing. In fact, Affleck as Mendez is all brooding seriousness. It’s a performance from the actor/director that fills the film—itself no slam-dunk as a story—with a bit of a minor miracle.

Set just on the cusp of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, Mendez is tasked with exfiltrating six American embassy workers, the only six that were able to flee the embassy before it and the rest of its occupants were seized by revolutionaries. Fearing that they’ll be executed if found and despairing of the government’s “give them bikes” solution, Mendez with the help of a producer and make-up artist creates an elaborate fake Hollywood/Canadian sci-fi film—Argo—and departs for Tehran, hoping to smuggle the sextet out as location scouts and assorted Canadian crew.

 

Of course, given that the film is based on a true story, one that was even (inaccurately, as it turns out) covered on the news in 1980, we know how this whole thing will end. Argo is, weirdly, the most continuously suspenseful heist film I can recall seeing, and that’s all the more surprising given that ultimately we know it’s going to be a successful heist. Nothing even ever really goes wrong, and its still more than a lot gripping.

 

That Affleck is able to create and sustain such tension out of a fairly straight-forward, no hokey-trick-playing story is what makes it, and his work, so impressive. Affleck coaxes fine performances out of the entire crew, and the film’s eye for detail in its authoritative recreation of 1980’s-era Iran and Hollywood is fine. There’s no lithe acrobat dude vaulting around a sealed room, there’s no shootouts to speak of really at all. All of Argo’s pure nerviness is a result of script, performance, direction, and the filmmakers’ attention to craft and detail.

That said, Argo’s not the best movie of the year, despite early word out of TIFF. It’s not close to being that, really. It’s a pretty entertaining, massively well-crafted spy drama, and it’s an absolute statement by Affleck that his bona fides as a director are no longer in any way to be doubted.