Argo See This Movie . . . Argo Review

Go see this movie.  Seriously.  Just stop whatever you're doing, find a theater, and go see Argo.  In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries captured the American embassy and held all but six of the embassy staff prisoner for 444 days.  Those six are the focus of this movie.  Ben Affleck directs himself as Tony Mendez, an exfil expert at the CIA in charge of extracting those six.  Undaunted by the Department of State's daring plan to drop bicycles into Tehran and hoping the six could bike 300 miles to the Turkish border, he concocts the daring plan to sneak the six out as members of a Canadian film crew in Tehran scouting locations. 

The movie is at turns tense, terrifying and amusing.  The attention to detail was amazing, as an afterword during the credits attests.  Except for Affleck (an East-coaster with about as much Hispanic blood as I do), each of the characters were perfectly cast to maximize physical resemblance.  The acting was superb--never over-the-top or maudlin, with a kind of underwhelming tension that never abated.  The danger was very real; at any moment, you felt, the six would be captured. 

One reviewer has noted that you should see this movie because it dramatizes history in such a way that history becomes interesting.  While I concede his point, I think the value of this movie lies in something more than its dramatization of history.  The value is the way in which it still informs foreign and current affairs.  If I had begun this review with a blurb about Middle Eastern revolutionaries capturing an American embassy, I could easily have invoked the destruction of the American embassy in Benghazi, and assassination of the American ambassador.  "Argo" counsels reactionary responses to violence; it challenges the basic assumptions about how nations respond to violence, and exposes the viewer to a subtler understanding about the inherent difficulties of dealing with sovereign nations. 

While the heart of the movie is rescuing the Houseguests, so called because of their extended stay in the Canadian ambassador's home, the periphery belongs both the revolutionaries in Iran and the strange world of Hollywood politics.  Neither are overblown, and each is given just enough screen-time to demonstrate the absurdity and seriousness of each. 

I highly recommend this movie.