Argo, the Science Fiction Film That Wasn't

Argo is the third Ben Affleck-directed film I’ve seen, and I’m impressed.  I’m not a fan of Ben Affleck the actor.  He’s there and not there; my eye and ear pass him by.  But as a director and writer (don't forget Good Will Hunting) he’s getting my attention.  I’m interested in watching what he’s done, learning his point of view.  Affleck has found his place, behind the camera, and so many wonderful actors are in this film that I think Hollywood and its actors have figured it out.  From the screenplay he wrote and directed based on Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone to The Town to Argo, Affleck has become an actor’s director to watch.

Argo is loosely based on the very real, front-page news of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.  While the Iranian revolutionaries took hostage everyone in the embassy, six Americans slipped out of the compound and found refuge in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor (a reserved and realistic performance by the always thoughtful Victor Garber), where they lived (sometimes under the floorboards) for three months.  CIA operative Tony Mendez, a.k.a. Kevin Harkness (played with quiet intensity by the director Ben Affleck) came up with a hare-brained scheme to smuggle them out of the country as a Canadian film crew working on a Hollywood science fiction movie.  This highly unlikely scenario worked — that truth is so often stranger than fiction may be the best part of a good story.

The six hidden escapees became known in the halls of the U.S. government as the “Houseguests.”  Their story is an engrossing one in which the audience can give a damn about everybody. Argo is a riveting two hours.  This level of tension is extraordinary in light of the fact that we already know how it turned out. 

“Harkness” calls on friends in Hollywood to help him set up the background for his plan. Alan Arkin is seriously hilarious as Hollywood producer Lester Siegel, who’s still got at the least chutzpah.  John Goodman reminds us what a fine straight man he is as the great make-up artist John Chambers.  These two men use their usually more frivolous professions to fabricate a false reality to cover the CIA story.  The Hollywood scenes of this conspiracy tickle us as the old pros set the P.R. wheels in motion to make the science fiction film “Argo” appear to be a real Hollywood movie.  That the Press believed — and therefore published — that this film within the film was a real movie was essential to the escape plan.  These efforts include a fashion show of a “table reading” of the absurd script with actors in costume and alien make-up to promote the film that would never be made.  A highlight of this was the appearance of Adrienne Barbeau as an oversexed Hollywood has-been cast as a galactic witch.  Inside jokes, yes, but it’s still great stuff.

Goodman as Chambers, Arkin as Siegel, and Affleck as Mendez/Harkness  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures

In contrast, the scenes in Washington, DC, are frustrating and infuriating, showing us men who all look alike repeating tired old ideas, plans that were used thirty years before.  The “suits” were as we expected them to be:  short sighted bureaucrats that almost derail the mission.  Bryan Cranston is Affleck’s supportive boss Jack O’Donnell.  He growls, he reins himself in to play the politics, until he cannot stop himself from blasting the desk jockeys when they make the wrong call.  All the DC characters are played by experienced and recognizable actors, from a tired-looking Kyle Chandler, to Bob Gunton and Philip Baker Hall, Keith Szarabajka and Zeljko Ivanek, and more.  While each one has only snippets of scenes to play — Mr. Affleck may have expected the American public to remember who those politicos were, which is a naive error — the actors are good enough to be spot on without any background provided for the audience.

Bryan Cranston as Jack O'Donnell  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures.

In the nail-biting scenes set in Iran, the actors cast as the Houseguests appeared remarkably similar to the actual people, only partly due to the ministrations of an expert hair and make-up crew.  Even better, the acting was so intense and realistic they could have been those people.  With straightforward characterizations, they created living people in a crisis situation — warts and all.  Kudos to (clockwise from the bottom front): 

-         Christopher Denham as Mark Lijek

-         Kerry Bishé as Kathy Stafford 

-         Scoot McNairy as Joe Stafford

-         Tate Donovan as Bob Anders

-         Rory Cochrane as Lee Schatz

-         Clea DuVall as Cora Lijek

The Houseguests.  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures.

 As Ambassador Taylor’s courageous and gracious wife Pat, Page Leong allowed us to see her fear of discovery under a graceful diplomatic facade.  As the ambassador’s maid, Sahar, Sheila Vand showed quiet strength and compassion.

Editor William Goldenberg and director Affleck kept the screenplay by Chris Terrio (based on an article by Joshuah Bearman) terse and tight. Every objection of the “houseguests” themselves, each procrastination, every hold-up in Washington or the airport, induced an internal scream.  I’d long since finished my popcorn before the last 15 minutes and found myself twisting and crushing the bag that had held it. By the end I bit onto the crumpled paper bag as if to keep from crying out when…well I wouldn’t want to throw in a spoiler.

Reports on this secret mission (declassified in 1997) are doubtless thousands of pages long.  It takes skill to tell the story as briskly as Argo does in less than two hours.  For all that, it is a movie, not a documentary.  Those who point out shortcuts and inaccuracies are missing the point.  I recommend this film for its sharp story-telling, its fine acting (including by those who never speak a word) and editing. Though home screens these days are two or three times the size of those sets on which some of us watched “Nightline” reports about the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, the truly big screens remain the best place to see this one.  Go to the movies and have a good time. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off to plan my next escape ….

A Multilayered Artist

“The Artist” is a romance.  And a comedy, and a drama.  Oh, and it’s a black & white silent film.  You will barely notice the lack of color since director Michel Hazanavicius and cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman somehow entreat your mind’s eye to “see” colors, just as good black & white photographers do.  It’s crisp, clear, and gorgeous, so relax and enjoy it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how this movie made me feel, what it made me believe.  It seemed to me that we have a fascination with early Hollywood — so early the sign on the hill still says “Hollywoodland.”  A time when the Hollywood dynasties were only just beginning, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. had yet to pass the mantel to his pretty son.  The magical apparatus was sometimes still apparent in those days, and everything was fresh and new.

 

Then suddenly, just when our nation was falling apart economically, sound seized the movies, and silent film stars went from the pinnacles of success and fame (not necessarily joy) to pits of depression and unemployment.  Rather like the nation.  In the early 1930s, things went from bad to worse; silent films disappeared altogether, while dust storms were building in the country’s breadbasket.  Meanwhile, however, the movie musical was born.  Now here we are in a new century, with new technologies in the movies, and a recession/depression/whatever you want to call it.  And we are drawn to that little industry that could, that skyrocketed along with post World War I America and somehow stayed afloat when the rest of the world sank.  Hollywood survived it all to grow to its present enormous power.  Face it, there was a greater furor in 2011 over Netflix messing with our movie supply (streaming! DVD!) than there was in 2000 over the hanging chads of the Florida election scandal.  See, you’ve already forgotten that, but you’re still mad at Netflix.  That’s power.

Anyway, that’s a lot of overthinking and probably a lot of bunk.  Mostly what Michel Hazanavicius did was write a scenario he believed would make a good movie, talk other people into producing it (thank you, producer Thomas Langmann), cast it brilliantly, all to give us this little gem called The Artist.  Who cares about the rest? 

Penelope Ann Miller wondering who Peppy is.

The film opens at a film opening in 1927, with silent film star George Valentin (deliciously played by Jean Dujardin) at the height of his powers and fame.  George is rather a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. sort of silent film actor, an acrobat with a big grin and a little moustache.  He leaps and fences and romances and has a fine old time.  George Valentin is a Star.  He is charming and vain and doubtless neglectful of his chilly wife, played to perfection by Penelope Ann Miller.  He has a loyal chauffeur played with quiet strength by James Cromwell, and a disloyal cigar-chomping producer played by John Goodman.  At the beginning of the film, George meets and becomes enamored of Peppy Miller, a shining starlet played glowingly by Bérénice Bejo.

John Goodman as the Producer

Mademoiselle Bejo is gorgeous in an unintimidating, gangly girl-next-door kind of way, with a huge smile and long limbs.  Her lean lines allow her to do a hilarious turn in George’s dressing room.  The innocent yet intimate moments between Peppy and George are sweet yet not saccharine.

And most importantly, George has the smartest and most loyal dog in the world, a Jack Russell called only “The Dog” in the credits, and brilliantly portrayed by Uggie. 

The Artist is a reversal of the standard movie romance, as well as the beloved film Singin' in the Rain.  In Singin' in the Rain, the not at all classy Lina Lamont was discovered to have a dreadful speaking voice.  In The Artist, the Lina Lamont character is Constance, hilariously played by Missy Pyle, and she is more likely to survive than George.

Valentin and his co-star Constance, played by Missy Pyle

The Artist is a film of faces, young and old.  Fine faces filled with character, wisdom, joy and pain, including Peppy’s maid played by Beth Grant, her butler played by Ed Lauter, and the sweet-natured nurse at Peppy’s house, as played by Lily Knight. 

Particularly delightful touches:

-       Before Peppy makes it big, we see her name climb up the credit list as years go by, with her name occasionally spelled in different ways ….

-        The marvelous scene on the staircase in which Peppy, running up the stairs, turns from above to talk with George, on his way down.  This requires no dialogue.  Whatever she says, with enthusiasm and joi de vivre, he receives with melancholy pleasure.  The scene is visually clever, while at its heart it’s all about the barely hidden feelings each has for the other.

-         The sudden advent of sound in George’s life is the stuff of his nightmare, literally.

-       Joyous use of black-and-white filming that makes painterly scenes of George’s life darkening as his career diminishes.

Jean Dujardin as George Valentin

But wait, didn’t I say this is a romance?  It is, but just as The Artist does a gender reversal of Singin' in the Rain, so is it a reversal of your standard romance.  Peppy needs no man to rescue her, but George needs someone.  And his Knight is a Lady.

The Artist is referential and reverent of the movies.  Not at all like Scorsese’s Hugo, in which his filmmaker character believes — incorrectly — that the movies create dreams.  It’s the dreams, and dreamers, who create movies.  The Artist contains a sequence of Citizen Kane breakfast shots that made me laugh out loud despite the sadness conveyed in them.  One long climactic interval is surprisingly yet appropriately accompanied by Bernard Hermann’s “Love Scene” from Vertigo.  It is a remarkable piece of music: Different as the scenes it accompanies are, it still weaves itself into the emotions of the characters. 

Berenice Bejo as Peppy Miller

The Artist is a fine piece of work, and movies aren’t made by a few people, but many.  I cannot close without mentioning the excellent original music by Ludovic Bource, the aforementioned glorious cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman, perfect film editing by Anne-Sophie Bion and Monsieur Hazanavicius, gorgeous production design and art direction by Laurence Bennett and Gregory S. Hooper respectively, along with set decoration by Austin Buchinsky and Robert Gould that brought us back in time, and, finally, costume design by Mark Bridges that doubtless made the actors believe it was 1930 and far, far away from the present.

George and Peppy a la Fred and Ginger

The Artist is utterly delightful.  I laughed, I cried, I held my breath, and was thoroughly warmed in its embrace.  It is absolutely my favorite movie of the year (yes, I went to see Hugo), and my pick for best picture, best director, and best screenplay.  Any other awards you want to give it are fine by me.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, contemplating going back to the theatre to see The Artist again.