Affleck’s Argo

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

It was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, international news back in high school, the siege on the American Embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage drama of diplomats that spanned all of 444 days. Who could forget the images of blindfolded Americans being paraded through throngs of angry Iranians?

But truth to tell, I did not know until recently that, aside from the ones held captive inside the embassy itself, there were six others who had fled it at the time the Iranian revolutionaries took over and that their story was just as dramatic.

Their story is what the movie “Argo”, now showing in Bacolod cinemas, is all about. Darkly comic, and often suspenseful, the movie is not an exact historical reenactment of the events, but it succeeds nevertheless – maybe because the facts are not as popularly known as the main hostage drama really was.

Directed and starred in by Ben Affleck, the movie claims to be “based on the true story” of Central Intelligence Agency specialist Tony Mendez about how they rescued the six Americans. As cover, they built the story of how a Hollywood company was doing a sci-fi film ”Argo”, complete with a real company, script, casting calls, read-throughs, trade press conferences.

The story they told the Iranians was that the six Americans were a group of Canadians who were in Iran looking for “exotic” locations for the film. This is one of the most interesting parts of the movie – how the CIA built, not just the cover story to bring the six out of Iran but also how it built back stories for each of them, to enable them to manage any questions that may arise in the three checkpoints they had to pass through in order to get to their boarding gate.

The airport scene is where the heart-stopping moments of the film are, when the viewer realizes one wrong answer from any of them can blow all their covers. In fact, the Mendez story, declassified only in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, said they went through the airport checks like a breeze, and the last-minute, glass-crashing scenes of the revolutionary guards were just dramatizations to heighten the story’s tensions.

There are other details that were not accurate, but Affleck, in one of his interviews, justified them by saying they do not claim the movie is a true story, but simply based on one.

Historians may frown at the way facts are played in this movie, and the casual manner with which the filmmakers toyed with them. But it is a gripping film to watch, especially for us who vicariously experienced this prolonged hostage drama that, no doubt, contributed to the failure of President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980. The hostages were released as he was leaving the Oval office.

The recreation of the scenes from the siege on the embassy was detailed – in fact, the movie juxtapositions the shots, real and reel, to better emphasize this. It was also in this part of the movie when the camera, dynamically used as an unobtrusive journalist, succeeds in giving us drama and excitement.

The movie must also be credited for its effort to explain, albeit briefly, the widespread anger that fueled the Iranian revolution – the insensitive rule of the Shah of Iran and how the people suffered under its callous claws.*

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