Argo

Eventually, we are going to have to forgive Ben Affleck for Gigli, Bounce, Paycheck, Jersey Girl and Reindeer Games.

His The Town (2010) was an impressive, enjoyable piece of entertainment, and once again at the helm he's done good work (mostly) with Argo, which is just about as exciting a movie as you'll get this year, although the last half hour is agonizingly suspenseful. Argo recounts (loosely) the 1980 rescue mission of the Canadian and U.S. governments on behalf of six Americans trapped in Tehran, Iran: Amidst the collapse of the Iranian government and increasing tensions between Iran and the U.S., the American embassy is besieged and most of the people inside taken hostage. Six escape, however, and they eventually make their way into the home of the Canadian ambassador.

Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA operations officer who hatches a hair-brained sceme: He will go to Tehran posing as a movie producer, and pass the six hostages off as a Canadian film crew doing a location scout for a bad B-movie, called Argo. Ben Affleck has never looked better than with his black, charcoaly hair and the accompanying beard--something about it feels totally late-70s/early 80s, and it's the hair, I think, that sells his performance. You take him seriously as the man entrusted with the lives of six others.  

Argo is, overall, a very successful political comic-thriller that pushes all the right buttons, sometimes with more demented glee than is enjoyable. As mentioned before, it's a stressful movie to watch, especially in the last fourth of the film--to the point that you stop feeling pleasurably excited. The finale functions as a clever form of audience manipulation, and as you feel your body move further and further from the back of your seat, your hands clasping your hair in sheer suspense, you realize you're being played like an electric fiddle. It's the movies at work, up to their old tricks again. They have this kinetic ability to hypnotize us, and yet we're somehow always aware that they're "only" movies. But the good ones defy our perception of reality. We know it's a movie, but, dammit, we have to know how it's going to be worked out.

The resulting emotion is a mixture of irritation and awe, possibly even gratitude, especially during a particularly impotent movie year. Perhaps we're victims of the crappy material to which we're subjected over the course of the movie year from January to October. By the time the handful of good movies comes out, Stockholm Syndrome has set in, and we become eager and willing participants in the manipulation of ourselves at the hands of our perverse captors.

There's a wonderful cast of grumpy old men: There's Bryan Cranston as Mendez's boss, a grizzled government veteran who stands up for his colleague's half-cocked plan of rescue; John Goodman as Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers (who won an Academy Award for his work on Planet of the Apes); and Alan Arkin as the seasoned movie director enlisted to help give Argo credibility. John Goodman is the kind of actor who makes you laugh the moment he appears on the screen. He's a jovial smartass teddy bear. And is there any actor of his generation who's as fun to watch playing a curmudgeonly hack as Alan Arkin?

With Kyle Chandler, Victor Garber (as the Canadian ambassador), and, as the six Americans trapped in Tehran: Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall (who looks stunning, by the way, in long black hair and glasses--she's never looked so geekily gorgeous), Michael Parks, Scoot McNairy, Kerry Bishe, and Christopher Denham. Also starring Chris Messina, Richard Kind, Titus Welliver, Rory Cochrane, Tom Lenk, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, and in a cameo, Adrienne Barbeau. 120 mins.

Drive

First-rate. It exists in some kind of alternate universe that's a mishmash of now and the 80s. Drive (2011) has a lusciously compelling pull to it--a sort of poetically violent dream set against Los Angeles, which never ceases to be a place of intrigue on the screen. Ryan Gosling plays a stunt man who makes money on the side as a getaway driver. He gets involved with his neighbor and then, when her husband is released from prison, agrees to help him get some mobsters off his back by knocking off a pawn shop. Things go awry.

What struck me most about Drive was its dreamlike quality. It envelopes you under a lulling canopy of cinematic comfort--fast-paced car chase, romantic suggestion, a subdued tension between the main character and everyone else, as though he doesn't really belong--and this almost soothing layer yields to dappled rays of violent energy riveting throughout. Gosling's character--he's known only as The Driver-- seems completely dulled over by the things he's done and seen, and yet he has heart. He's not in it for the money, but out of an almost antiquated sense of heroism. He's trying to protect a woman and her young son from heartless thugs. But he brutalizes himself in the process of trying to protect Innocence.

Drive has sparse dialogue. This is refreshing in a world where most movies have nothing to say and confirm this with an incessant barrage of mindless chatter. In Drive, the actors are forced to convey much with few words. Facial expressions, deliberate pauses that turn into drawn-out silences, all become far more telling, and more fascinating, than what could be accomplished by lots of talk. What's said has greater weight because there's less fluff to the dialogue. It's economical.

And the music (by Angelo Badalamenti)--it's deliciously synthesized. This is where Drive feels like it came out of the 80s. But the music isn't corny or over-the-top. It acts like an incubating sheen over the film--and over the audience--imbibing you, massaging you into this movie's unusual balance of calm and chaos.

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. With Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Issac, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman.