Argo

By now, everyone’s over the fact that Ben Affleck – who once frol­icked on a yacht in a J‑Lo video – has set out his stall as a seri­ous direc­tor. Appar­ent­ly, good looks and film­mak­ing tal­ent aren’t mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. Gone Baby Gone was a sol­id, mus­cu­lar detec­tive thriller; The Town was rife with ten­sion and betrayal.

For his third film as direc­tor, the Mass­a­chu­setts boy has final­ly strayed beyond Boston’s city lim­its but, unfor­tu­nate­ly, he’s got a lit­tle lost. You can’t blame him for allow­ing a true sto­ry as juicy as this one to lure him out of his com­fort zone. ​‘The Cana­di­an Caper’ is a recent­ly declas­si­fied, too-barmy-to-be-believed doozy to rank along­side explod­ing cig­ars and poi­soned umbrel­la tips in the annals of inter­na­tion­al espionage.

In 1980, in the midst of the Iran­ian Hostage Cri­sis, CIA oper­a­tive Tony Mendez and six embassy staff escaped Tehran on a flight to Switzer­land by pos­ing as the crew of a fic­tion­al Hol­ly­wood sci-fi film, com­plete with posters, cos­tumes and an office on the old Colum­bia lot. The real-life Mendez was a for­mer head of the CIA’s Dis­guise Sec­tion, whose CV includ­ed trans­form­ing an Asian diplo­mat and a black agent into two Cau­casian busi­ness­men (eat your heart out, Wayans brothers).

Affleck’s Mendez is a much less inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, vague­ly defined by over-famil­iar traits – worka­holic, estranged from his fam­i­ly, glugs whisky from the bot­tle in stress­ful moments. The sup­port­ing cast is superb (Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Good­man), but as they move their inter­est­ing faces in inter­est­ing ways, it’s hard not to wish that one of them had been draft­ed in to work their mag­ic on the under­writ­ten lead.

Even sport­ing a beard, Ben Affleck isn’t crag­gy enough, and nei­ther is his sto­ry­telling style. This is an episode illus­trat­ing the dubi­ous his­to­ry of west­ern inter­ven­tion in the Mid­dle East that’s fit-to-burst with con­tem­po­rary res­o­nance, yet Argo prefers to swift­ly spoon­feed the pol­i­tics in order to remove it from the table.

The open­ing sequence is a dummy’s guide to twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Iran, com­plete with car­toon illus­tra­tions. You don’t need to be a fan of Wash­ing­ton Post op-eds to feel patro­n­ised. But nev­er mind the seri­ous stuff, worse is that Argo fails to tease out the deli­cious, self-aggran­dis­ing irony of a movie about how movies saved the world and, as a result, nev­er has as much fun as it should.

There are a thou­sand bril­liant details in the 2007 Wired arti­cle which could have made this the Great Satan’s cel­e­bra­to­ry ​‘up yours’ to po-faced, booze-ban­ning theocrats every­where. It set­tles instead for a few indus­try in-jokes: ​“You’re wor­ried about the Aya­tol­lah, try the WGA!!!” (Ha ha, ROFL, etc.) Affleck is a straight-for­ward, square-jawed mak­er of straight-for­ward, square-jawed thrillers, which is just what you want from a blue-col­lar Boston crime saga, but not so much with a sto­ry as rich with sub­text as this.

For now it seems a crude­ly insult­ing YouTube clip with bar­gain base­ment pro­duc­tion val­ues will remain Amer­i­can cinema’s most point­ed inter­ven­tion in the Mid­dle East. On the plus side, Argo does prove what many of us have long sus­pect­ed: in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, good looks can, in fact, be a bar­ri­er to film­mak­ing greatness.