Not wholly true but wholly suspenseful

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2012)

Rarely can a film title have been so unilluminating about its subject matter - in this case, the astonishing true life story of how six Americans stationed in the US Embassy in Teheran when it was stormed in 1979 managed to walk out and take refuge with the Canadian Ambassador before being spirited out of the country by a bizarre CIA operation, the details of which were only declassified in 1997. "Argo" was the title of a science fiction film which was actually scripted but never made and provided the cover for the six who amazingly pretended to be a scouting crew for the planned movie.
The work opens with a rapid-fire post-Secomd World War history of Iran which makes plain why many Iranians are suspicious of the West (the Americans and British arranged a coup in 1953 against the democratically elected Prime Minister). It then shows the 1979 storming of the embassy by fundamentalist forces in a style that is so real it is almost documentary (the credits show contemporary photographs which underline the verisimilitude of the movie). Most of the film, though, focuses on the planning and execution of the exfiltration (as the CIA termed it) by the Agency's top 'exfil' guy Tony Mendez. The final segment, a bit of post-escape bonhomie, should have been excised.
in some ways, this cannot have been an easy film to make because we all know the outcome from the beginning and for this incredible tale to be credible on the screen it could not depart too much from the facts (it is unfair to Britain's role), so Ben Affleck as director has done a terrific job in sustaining the tension without adding too much fiction and his portrayal of Mendez is convincingly understated (this is an agent who never fires gun or even wields a fist but relies solely on guile and sheer guts). Among a fine cast of support actors, the stand out is Alan Arkin as a veteran Hollywood producer.