movies
GOING HOLLYWOOD Affleck plays a CIA operative who takes movie escapism to a whole new level.
Argo ★★★
B
ill Clinton probably should have gotten credit of some kind in Ben Affleck’s latest production. The former president may not have written the true story on which it’s based, but he did declassify it. If not for the action Clinton took in 1997, everything that happens in Argo would still be a secret today. Not that everything that happens in Affleck’s third directorial effort actually happened. The film opens with a breathless recreation of the November 4, 1979, storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were taken hostage by revolutionary forces. Everyone knows what happened to them over the following 444 days. What few people knew for nearly two decades, however, is that six State Department staffers slipped out the back door undetected and made their way to the relative safety of the Canadian ambassador’s home. They hid there for months while the CIA, the State Department and Jimmy Carter worked on a way to get them home without getting the hostages killed. Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, the reallife CIA operative and “exfiltration” special-
ist who concocted the improbable solution. His idea was to fly into Iran by himself and fly out with the six refugees posing as a Canadian film crew scouting Middle Eastern locations for a low-budget Star Wars rip-off called Argo. I kept waiting for somebody to say, “It’s so crazy, it just might work.” The picture is an almost one-of-a-kind mix of political thriller and Hollywood satire. Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio infuse the factual account supplied by Mendez in his 1999 memoir, The Master of Disguise, with fictional embellishments and tensioncranking plot devices designed to maximize the movie’s goose-bump factor. Chief among these is a story line in which menacing Iranian authorities little by little connect the dots and close in on the fleeing Americans just as freedom comes into view. Which makes for some white-knuckle final moments, but — minor detail — never actually happened. Comic relief is provided by the two tinseltown vets Mendez enlists to help pull off the ruse. John Goodman plays John Chambers, a makeup artist who won an honorary Oscar for his work on Planet of the Apes and had a
role in the design of Mr. Spock’s ears on “Star Trek.” Alan Arkin’s character, Lester Siegel, is a composite of several legendary personalities, including Chambers’ actual partner, effects wizard Bob Sidell, whose credits include E.T. These two help give the agent the cover he needs for his story by setting up a production office, arranging casting calls, holding script readings and even taking out a fullpage ad in Variety. Both performers do some of the most winning work of their careers. The acting in Argo is uniformly solid, as are the dialogue, the pacing and the dead-on period details. This is a picture that’s both well made and well meaning. If it falters to some degree — which I feel it does — that happens, ironically, because it succumbs in
places to the same fondness for Hollywood formula that it parodies. Hey, I’m as up as anyone for a fact-based tale of intrigue in which the CIA is on the side of right for once, and America gets the better of Middle Eastern zealots. But I’m not a big fan of having my buttons pushed, and Affleck has turned Mendez’s account into a well-oiled big-screen suspense machine that pushes them in all the usual places in all the usual ways. For a story about out-of-the-box thinking and high-risk heroism, Argo plays it surprisingly safe. RICK KISONAK
REVIEWS
84 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
10.17.12-10.24.12
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
Seven Psychopaths ★★★★
S
even Psychopaths isn’t an easy movie to describe. The title says “horror flick”; the marketing says “Pulp Fiction knockoff.” Neither is accurate. If you try to pitch the movie to a friend, you may find yourself saying things like “Tom Waits carries a white rabbit wherever he goes, because he adopted it when he and the love of his life murdered the Zodiac Killer. He’s a psychopath, see, but a good psychopath.” It’s not unlike trying to convey the essence of an encounter with the fabled Men in Black. This is actually an encounter with Irish playwright Martin McDonagh — who, as anyone who saw Saints & Poets Production Company’s The Pillowman last fall can attest, has a brilliantly twisted mind. Seven Psychopaths is the first feature McDonagh has written and directed since the black comedy In Bruges (2008). Loosely structured and self-indulgent, but still highly entertaining, it finds him going in a Charlie Kaufman direction while pirating ideas from some of his own theatrical works, including The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. As in the former play, the protagonist is a writer and obvious authorial stand-in (Colin Farrell as Marty) who spins stories within
the story. As in the latter, the antagonist is a psychopathic gangster (Woody Harrelson as Charlie) with an incongruously tender attachment to his pet. What brings them together is Billy (Sam Rockwell), who is Marty’s best friend and, for all intents and purposes, his id. While Marty, a hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter, frets about scripting yet another hyperviolent movie that glorifies psychopaths and their antics (yes, his project is called Seven Psychopaths), Billy goes out and finds real madmen to inspire him. Marty ponders the cinematic potential of peaceful psychopaths — Quaker or Buddhist ones, say — even as his loose-cannon friend puts him on a collision course with the other kind. An actor with a tendency to punch directors during auditions, Billy has a side job: kidnapping pampered pet dogs for the reward money, under the supervision of genteel, ascoted career criminal Hans (Christopher Walken). When Billy abducts Charlie’s beloved shih tzu, all three men find themselves squarely in harm’s way. If this sounds like a shaggy-shih-tzu story rather than a tightly plotted thriller, it is — and that’s part of the joke. Billy and Marty are one-note characters, petulant boys play-
MAN WITH A (PSYCHO) PLAN Rockwell tries to convince Walken and Farrell he knows what he’s doing kidnapping a gangster’s beloved pooch.
ing at grown-up violence. But their arguments about how to end the movie within a movie — bloody shoot-out? quiet epiphany? both? — obviously mirror the author’s internal debates. McDonagh has made a conscious choice to work in a film tradition that combines shocking brutality with equally shocking irreverence, yet he pokes fun at the genre’s conventions in scenes that it’s hard to imagine Quentin Tarantino writing. You know something weird is happening when Walken’s character is the gentle voice of reason. Hans critiques Marty’s writing of female characters (an analysis that applies equally to the film we’re watching) and asks why he wants to write about psychopaths, anyway: “They get kind of tiresome after a while, don’t you think?” Indeed, they do. For decades, we’ve made
fictional psychos of one kind or another into folk heroes: Norman Bates, Freddy, Jason, Tony Montana, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan. By inventing righteous killers who only hunt other killers (like Dexter or Waits’ character), we can even have our sociopathic cake and eat it, too. McDonagh doesn’t explain where pop culture’s boundless appetite for colorful crazies comes from, or what it has to do, if anything, with our feelings about genuine mental illness. But he does chase it back to the gleeful pleasure of spinning tall tales just for the hell of it. In the process, he spins a pretty good one himself, even if anyone who tries to recap it will find him- or herself not making a lick of sense. M A R G O T HA R R I S O N