Fascinating story about a little known rescue mission

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2012)

Ben Affleck proves yet again,that he is a gifted director and that his previous offerings (Gone Baby Gone and The Town)were not flukes. Both films were set in Affleck's native city of Boston.
His latest film, Argo, tells the story of the rescue by the CIA of American diplomats in Iran during the Hostage Crisis.We are give a crash course in Iranian History taking us up to the events in 1979 when the US Embassy was stormed in November of that year.
The diplomats, six of them, hid in the Canadian Ambassador's residence, while the main hostages were held in the American Embassy. Affleck, plays CIA agent, Tony Menendez,who is tasked with getting them out of Iran. His plan is so outrageous that it could have come from an episode of Mission Impossible. Why not have the diplomats pose as a film crew making a sci-fi movie called....Argo? For this, Menendez travels to Hollywood where he creates a fake production with media notices, a producer and a script.The previous ideas for a rescue floated by the CIA were even more far fetched.
Comic relief is provided by Alan Arkin as the movie producer who realises what is at stake, and yet treats the whole thing with a world weary movie mogul air. Arkin gets the bulk of the film's funny lines. There are lots of visual gags about Hollywood especially about the poor Star Wars knock offs that Hollywood produced in the late 1970s.We are also given snippets of the tension between the CIA , the State Department and Jimmy Carter's White House.
Affleck assembles a huge cast of talented actors including Tate Donovan,Clea Duvall,Bryan Cranston and John Goodman and gets great performances. He also shoots his film with a grainy stock to give it that 1970s feel. The crowd scenes depicting the stormy of the Embassy compound are well done. You can smell the panic inside the building as the staff decide to burn all the classified papers.
Well done,Mr Affleck. Oscars nominations ahoy???