I just saw the movie Argo and I feel like I should say something about it because I wrote about it several years before it was made. Well, not exactly. But I wrote a piece on Criminal Brief called A Real-Life Genuine Phony Hollywood Spy Story,which was about the bizarre true event that served as a basis for Argo. If you aren't familiar with it here's the one-sentence synopsis: during the Iranian hostage crisis the CIA got six hostages out by pretending they were a Canadian film crew.
So here's my review: it's a good movie. You'll like it. But you'll like it better if you don't read my earlier piece first, because the more you know about what really happened the more likely you are to be annoyed by the parts the movie gins up. Apparently a spy sneaking into an insane theocracy to slip out six civilians, knowing that a single mistake could get them all beheaded was not suspenseful enough for Hollywood without a few added gimmicks. Sigh.
I blame it on Irving Thalberg. I believe he was the producer in the 1930s who dictated that every movie had to end with a 99 yard dash for a touchdown. Apparently Ben Affleck and friends decided that the ball wasn't quite far enough back for the climax so they had to libel the Carter administration (who apparently did not look quite bad enough in real life) and bring in a lot of machine guns. Plus they invented an airline pilot so oblivious to the world around him that he made those two clowns who flew a state or two past their destination a few years ago look like paragons of alertness.
Honestly what annoyed me most was not the lies they put in so much as the facts they left out to make room (or because they didn't fit the story they were telling). Here are a few true incidents that did not make the movie (which remember, is both funny and suspenseful):
- The forgers put the wrong date on some of the passports, indicating that the carriers were travelers from the future.
- The Canadian cabinet had to meet in secret to authorize false passports. Then the authorities refused one to the CIA agent, because he had not been included in the vote.
- When the hero visited the Iranian consulate, he left his portfolio in the taxi cab.
- The CIA agents’ map of Tehran led them to the Swedish embassy instead of the Canadian one.
- On the morning of the actual escape, our hero slept through his alarm.
And let me say that one reason I liked is that any flick which gives a juicy comic part to Alan Arkin does a service for mankind. (And the fact that Arkin's character is a composite didn't bother me at all..)
Here's the irony, by the way. I was at a songwriting group this week and a woman had written a song about a real person. I told her "you have to decide whether you're serving the person or the song." In other words, she was cleaving too closely to the truth. So call me a hypocrite, I guess.
Tangential episode: Speaking of the CIA, more than a decade ago I was at a dinner party and was seated near the new boyfriend of a woman I know. I asked him what he did for a living and he said he was an engineer. Well, practically everyone in my wife's family is an engineer so I asked what kind. "Systems engineer," he said, and put so much unspeakable boredom into those two words that I changed the subject.