Ben Affleck’s Argo is a tense, funny espionage thriller with an underwritten hero. Alan Arkin and John Goodman supply the life, while the rescue plot supplies enough suspense to forgive some conspicuous contrivance.
Argo has an unusually good excuse for putting Hollywood at the centre of an international crisis. Its CIA rescue plan requires six American diplomats in Iran to pass as a Canadian crew scouting a science-fiction film, so someone has to make the nonexistent production look credible. Ben Affleck, directing and playing operative Tony Mendez, understands how much suspense there is in asking frightened people to sell a ridiculous story. It is a good, often funny thriller, though the people involved deserve a little more attention than Chris Terrio’s screenplay gives them.
The Hollywood passages are where that screenplay is most alive. Alan Arkin’s Lester Siegel and John Goodman’s John Chambers bring an appealing lack of reverence to the business of making films, and neither actor strains to make the scheme sound amusing. We laughed at their exchanges about the fake production; the delivery is so businesslike that the scheme briefly sounds sensible. Affleck lets their timing carry the scenes without making the surrounding danger seem trivial.
Rodrigo Prieto’s photography gives Hollywood and Tehran distinct lighting, helping the shifts between comedy and danger register without a lengthy change of pace. Sharon Seymour’s production design makes the late-1970s setting convincing without insisting that we inspect every corner of it. Washington, Hollywood and Tehran remain easy to distinguish as the story moves among them, which matters in a film with so much organising to do. The period detail supports the actors instead of competing with them.
William Goldenberg’s editing is the most persuasive part of the operation. He keeps the separate strands legible while varying the pace enough that the jokes release pressure without emptying the tense scenes of it. Alexandre Desplat’s score helps maintain that unease, although we could sometimes do with less encouragement to worry. Against espionage thrillers that depend on gunplay, Argo gets satisfying mileage from the possibility that somebody will fail to believe what they are being told.
Affleck is less interesting in front of the camera. His restrained Mendez gives the scheme a steady centre, but restraint alone cannot supply the personal detail Terrio has left out. We understand the task much more clearly than the man, and the other performances cannot quite disguise how thinly the lead is written. Arkin and Goodman are so immediately recognisable as people with working lives that the lack becomes harder to ignore whenever the film returns to its hero.
The suspense also becomes too emphatic as the film goes on. Affleck and Goldenberg push the timing hard enough for us to notice the construction, and some of the extra urgency feels imposed on an already tense situation. That is a familiar thriller habit, but it sits awkwardly with the careful, plausible handling of the earlier material. The extra insistence is unnecessary when the basic deception has already given us enough to worry about.
There is still a good deal to enjoy, particularly whenever Arkin and Goodman are allowed to get on with their business. At 120 minutes, the film has space for that comedy without losing track of the rescue plan. Choose it when the evening calls for suspense, but nobody particularly wants two hours of uninterrupted misery.
