Those films reminded us that Affleck was smart, talented, and driven but it took Argo, his third film as a director, to turn that talent into popular success. The real-life drama about the stranger-than-fiction rescue of the six Americans who escaped the U.S. Embassy in Iran when it was stormed in 1980 took a few liberties with the historical record to create a nail-biter of an escape thriller. It earned Affleck a Best Director award from the Director's Guild of America, Best Director and Best Picture Golden Globes, an award for the ensemble cast from the Screen Actors Guild, and BAFTA wins for Best Picture and Best Director. While Affleck was left out of the Best Director Oscar nominations, Argo went on to win the Best Picture of the year at the Academy Awards.
Affleck also takes the lead as CIA extraction expert Tony Mendez, the man who concocted a plan that involved creating a fake Hollywood movie production as cover to the rescue of the six Americans, who were hiding out in the Canadian embassy in Tehran. Mendez is the fulcrum of the story and Affleck plays the part of the escape mastermind with the low-key savvy of a professional managing the complicated moving parts. The key to the plan was creating false identities for the Americans and putting in place a complicated cover story about scouting locations for a Hollywood picture in Iran to get them out of Iran through a public, well-guarded airport before the government realized they were even missing.
Part of the film is like a good-natured heist movie or confidence game, with Mendez teaming up with two Hollywood veterans, special effects make-up artist John Chambers (played with genial enthusiasm by John Goodman) and old-school producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin, all tart sass and sardonic humor), to convince Hollywood that their fake picture is the real deal. The rest is a mix of spy movie thriller and political drama, with Mendez and his CIA support team (notably Bryan Cranston as his ragged boss) running interference stateside while Mendez coaches his civilian charges through the checkpoints and interrogations of Iranian airport security.
Affleck shoots the film in a style reminiscent of seventies thrillers. In the opening scenes, he and screenwriter Chris Terrio establish the era and the complicated history that created the Iranian situation smartly and efficiently. Affleck seamlessly combines archival news footage with superb recreations of the protests outside the U.S. Embassy to show the sudden explosion of chaos and danger and uses handheld cameras to give us an intimate, immediate connection to the rush inside to destroy documents before they are overrun. Affleck's arrival at CIA headquarters tracks him weaving through desks and cubicles, reminiscent of All the President's Men. Scenes back in the Canadian Embassy show the tension that builds over months of hiding out, unable to go outside and ready to slip out of sight into a hidden crawlspace at a moment's notice, be it the sound of gunfire in the street, a helicopter overhead, or a knock at the door.
If Affleck slips, it is in resorting to escape-movie contrivances to drive the film's final act. It's a real balancing act as the script piles on complications, hurdles, and races against the clock for down-to-the-wire bits of spy movie drama. It's all Hollywood embellishments for dramatic tension, but as the real Tony Menendez explains in an interview, "That's how it felt." Affleck makes it work by maintaining that seventies realism aesthetic, focusing on the details of each encounter and on the reactions of the civilians holding their cover together. Tony, who has been their team leader all this time, takes a support position, nudging here, offering a card there, playing the part of the associate producer on hand to help out the location scouting team. If Affleck the director pushes the adrenaline for maximum tension, Affleck the actor is all restraint as Mendez, letting the others showboat in the key scenes while he hangs back, taking stock and holding it all together. Just like a director. And when you come down to it, there is something oddly appropriate in the way this meeting of Hollywood fakery and true-story spycraft plays out like a movie. Affleck makes it an absolutely compelling movie without getting too self-congratulatory about it. For all the embellishments, he never lets us forget that their lives are on the line.
Argo was first released on Blu-ray in early 2013. For this new "Extended Edition" (subtitled "Declassified"), Affleck adds about nine minutes of footage to the film, almost all of it dealing with Tony Mendez's family life. Separated from his wife and his son, these scenes establish the bond between them in a series of telephone conversations, the easy rapport between father and son as the boy explains what he's watching on TV and the strained affection between husband and wife as she steels herself for his next sudden absence. Taylor Schilling, who plays Christine Mendez, was only briefly seen in the original film, but she has numerous scenes in this edition, either on the other end of a phone call with Affleck or protecting her son from potential disappointment from his absent father. The additions fill out the character of Tony Mendez and what's on the line for him personally as he undertakes yet another covert mission. It does, however, lead to a glaring continuity error when one of the new scenes, showing Tony watching an episode of "Battlestar Galactica" with his son, jumps directly to the scene in the theatrical cut where Tony gets the inspiration for the rescue plan while watching one of the Planet of the Apes movies.
The new edition features all of the extras from the original release plus a disc of new supplements. The most interesting is the "Picture-in-Picture: Eyewitness Account," a running audio-visual commentary track with Mendez, President Carter, former Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor, the "house guests" (as they are identified in their interview clips) Mark Lijek, Bob Anders, Cora Lijek, Kathy Stafford, and Lee Schatz who were hidden in the Canadian Embassy, even the housemaid who worked at the embassy and kept the secret. It plays a bit like a complimentary documentary, offering a personal perspective to the fictionalized presentation and in some cases correcting the dramatization with the true story, including clearing up the fiction that Mendez went rogue to force the White House into going forward. Both Mendez and Carter talk about how the President personally okayed the mission. It's not wall-to-wall clips, but it is very effective.
Also carried over from the earlier Blu-ray is the standard commentary track with director Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio (on the theatrical version only), the 16-minute featurette "Rescued From Tehran: We Were There" featuring the participants of the picture-in-picture track, the 2004 Canadian documentary "Escape from Iran: The Hollywood Option," originally produced for History Television, and the short featurettes "Absolute Authenticity" (with Affleck and his collaborators discussing the production) and "Argo: The CIA and Hollywood Connection" (a shorter piece that plays like a lively promotional featurette).
A second disc features an hour of all-new supplements. "Argo Declassified" revisits the history behind the story with interview clips seen elsewhere in the supplements, "The Istanbul Journey" looks at the three-week shoot in Turkey (which doubled for Iran in the film), "Ben Affleck's Balancing Act" on the challenges of being a director, actor, and producer on the same film, the interview featurettes "A Discussion with the Cast of Argo" (with clips from a Q&A session with Affleck, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Clea Duvall and others) and "Tony Mendez on Tony Mendez" (with the real-life agent discussing the mission and his career in general), and a montage of clips features characters speaking the film's signature phrase "Argo F**k Yourself."
It all comes packaged in a thick paperboard slipcase with the Blu-ray disc plus a 64-page hardcover booklet with photos and film notes, a replica Tony Mendez ID badge (with Affleck's mug shot), and two 16" x 20" posters, one a map of Tehran with notes on the film, the other a poster of the fictional Argo that served as the operational cover. Also includes an UltraViolet digital HD copy.
By Sean Axmaker
