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.

The Imposter

The Imposter (2012) chronicles the case of a missing 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay of San Antonio, who allegedly turned up four years later in Spain. After he's identified and returned to his family, questions start to surface about the truth of his identity. Why does he have brown eyes all the sudden, instead of blue? He claims that he was kidnapped and tortured by a secret international group of military officers, but there's no evidence to support these wild and horrifying claims. Still, the family insists he's their son, despite all the glaring differences.

Director Bart Layton treats the material like an episode of Dateline. So there are interviews with real-life people and reenactments with actors. It's passably interesting, even compelling at times, but you're likely to feel swindled if you pay to see this in a theater. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about it. The case itself is disturbing, and fascinating for its sensational qualities, but Layton stretches the material to fit a feature length, and you feel the contrivances creeping up on you. Some of the interviews are unintentionally funny, and the stupidity that's captured on camera often makes you wonder if a great big joke isn't being played on the audience.

The Third Man

Over the years, The Third Man (1949) has acquired quite a reputation as a great film. I think it's a fairly obvious thriller, not a horrible movie by any means, but overrated. It's a post-WW2 film noir about an American novelist (Joseph Cotten) who travels to Vienna to visit his longtime pal Harry Lime. But when he arrives, he finds that Harry has just recently died--under mysterious circumstances--and undertakes his own investigation of Harry's death when the authorities fail to offer a satisfying explanation. As cinematically impressive as this movie is, it's also very dated. It feels like a lesser hybrid of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Joseph Cotten lacks the stylized, cocksure arrogance that worked so well for Humphrey Bogart in Falcon and The Big Sleep, and Orson Welles, who shows up in a supporting role, does his usual Orson Wellesy acting: talking over other people's lines, dropping his voice in and out. It feels more obvious here than in some of his other performances. I can't deny that the film is visually interesting and creative: director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker do good work turning this mystery into a sort of valentine to an era of loss and shapelessness: Europe's writhing period of recovery after the War. But the lightweight, annoyingly pleasant music score by Anton Karas kills the mood of the film. Perhaps this movie would have been too melodramatic with a more intense score, but the lilting zither, which plays intermittently throughout the picture, wears out its welcome early on. The images are stark and interesting, though. With Allida Valli, who might be a B-movie Ingrid Bergman, and Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, and Wilfrid Hyde-White in an amusing turn as a British literary enthusiast who unwittingly talks Cotten into speaking at his club, not realizing he's a hack. Also with Erich Ponto, Ernst Deutsch, and Siegfried Breuer. Adapted by Graham Greene from his short novel. 104 mins. b & w