Arts: Argo

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Movies Argo Director Ben Affleck's Iran hostage crisis thriller is his best movie yet. By Dana Stevens Posted Friday, Oct 12, 2012, at 02:00 PM ET In his third movie, Argo (Warner Bros.), actor-director Ben Affleck pulls off a nifty trick. He takes a little-known but incredible true-life story—the clandestine CIA rescue of six stranded Americans during the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis—and turns it into a rip-roaring Hollywood thriller, complete with romance, a comic subplot, and a car chase or two. Argo isn't quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage—smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like Dog Day Afternoon. But Lumet lite still goes down pretty smooth. The events Argo recounts took place a few months after demonstrators laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomatic employees prisoner for what would turn out to be well over a year. Argo sets up this takeover with an opening montage that cleverly deploys old news footage, storyboard panels, and voice-over to fill in the complex back story—it goes all the way back to 1953, when the United States and Britain backed the coup that installed an authoritarian Shah. After the Shah fled Iran during the Islamic revolution, eventually seeking medical treatment in the United States, Jimmy Carter refused to extradite him to his home country to stand trial. It's on an image of the resulting chaos—an image re-created almost verbatim from news photographs of the time—that the movie proper begins: an angry mob just beginning to scale the walls ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Joe Biden Is the Happy Warrior Martha Raddatz Rocked The Manchurian Network	Advertisement
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