suspenseful but self-congratulatory and smug

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2012)

I didn't know Ben Affleck had it in him, and I thoroughly enjoyed this film--with a few reservations, of course.
Ben as a government operative, John Goodman as a 70s B-movie director, and Alan Arkin as an aging producer in the same tarnished golden age of movies, engineer a fake movie as a cover-story for getting six Americans out of Tehran in the middle of the 1979-1980 Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis. The film has some great laughs at Hollywood's expense, and maintains a successful, suspenseful storyline as Affleck tries to outsmart trigger-happy revolutionaries and get six reluctant, terrified bureaucrats to safety. It's down to the wire as the entire sequence of the disguised Americans getting through Tehran airport security has you biting your nails: you know they get out alive anyway, but you feel the tension of their escape, and as much as we hate airport security, our hearts were beating as fast and anxiously as were those of the escapees. A true-to-life story that stayed classified for 17 years emerges as an entertaining, politically sensitive drama, and I bet a lot of viewers were like me, doubting that Affleck had it in him, but engaged, all the same.
My hesitations involved some of the politics of this film and the way the Americans frame themselves as the undeserved good-guys, and follow a narrower, less ambiguous story, amid the much more complicated Islamic Revolution under way around it. The film's brief, voice-over narration at the beginning gives the history lesson of the original Shahs, the democratic secularist whom the people elected, and the ruler (Khomeni's predecessor) whom America and Britain installed in the democratic ruler's place. But no one so much as wrung their hands over the course of the rest of the film over America's helping to create the strife in Iran in the first place, when all eyes were focused on getting six Americans to safety instead. One is glad they're eventually free, and one can see Affleck's character as a hero this way, but I thought it was much too easy to congratulate ourselves for freeing six innocents, when our nation's hands are dirty in bringing suffering, oppression, and death to thousands. A more complicated, more ambiguous movie could have explored American involvement from a greater array of angles, but I think the resulting film would have been less self-congratulatory and smug about the ways American interests have backfired overseas.