#105
Post
by feihong » Sun Feb 24, 2013 6:51 am
Finally tonight I got to see this movie. It's interesting to me that the film is now a serious contender for Oscar glory--not to say that it's entirely surprising, given that it's one of Hollywood's favorite sons tackling a sobering issue with some sense of tact, and that in the end the film is a pat on the back to the huckster chutzpah of Hollywood dream merchants and their elaborate fantasies. The reason it's interesting that the film is a contender, and that it garners such high praise here on the board, and most everywhere else, is that the film is really not very well-made at all. There are huge problems in the scripting of the film, the directing--even the cinematography seemed thoroughly off to me. I know that it's naive of me to think that the Best Picture Oscar should go to a landmark film of some kind, but when I think about this picture possibly winning it, I wonder to myself, "shouldn't the Best Picture be a good movie?"
Of course, The Sting won Best Picture, and so did Out of Africa, and Crash, so that sentiment holds no special purchase in reality. Nor is the Oscar a measure of the way a film marks us, or of the way a film may advance its medium. But I can't really help hoping that the picture that wins is a pretty great picture. And while of the other nominees I've only seen Les Miserables--and I hope that one doesn't get Best Picture, either, because it's a mess as well--I can't help thinking there are better choices than Argo.
That is mostly just introduction to all the problems I have with this movie. I don't think I can sort them into much of a productive order--I found I could start talking crap about the movie while it was still running, and debating the filmmaking choices while the movie is running is generally a bad sign for the film. Normally I just sit there quiet and take in the picture, and wait until afterwards to start organizing a series of thoughts. But I encountered things that bothered me in large and small ways throughout, and so I'll just plunge into them with a bare minimum of organization; sorry.
The immediate problem that hit me was the many, many ways in which this film was helpless to recreate the sense of the 1970s. Upon the first cut to Los Angeles, I wondered out loud to myself where the smog layer had got to. I remember nearly every afternoon of my childhood looking to a horizon that featured a distinctive, rust-colored band of foul air--the smog layer that was so vivid you could smell it's acrid burn. The Los Angeles of the film, in the long shots, was as clear as a modern sky could be. I thought of the scents and aromas of my childhood, and made a second disappointing realization: hardly anyone smokes in Argo. Yet I remember as a child visiting houses of just about anyone I knew and seeing and smelling and feeling the light filtered through clouds of cigarette haze. Ashtrays aren't exceptionally visible in Argo; though they were a basic necessity of furniture in the late 70s.
Noticing no one stubbing out a cigarette butt in most scenes, gradually everything the actors did began to annoy me. Nearly every English-speaker in the film cussed a blue streak through the picture, and that lack of decorum gave me pause. Then as the engine of suspense began to push forward and the actors started playing out the kind of dialogue familiar to us from decades of Tom Clancy movies, and Die Hards, and Law and Order and 24 on television. Actors began approaching other actors, interrupting their...whatever they were doing; it's hard to recall them doing anything...and with no introduction they started shouting orders at one another. "Get it done!" "They're running out of time!" "We have to move!" "Do everything I say!" Everyone's familiar with this way of talking, unless you've been living under a rock where there's no TV for about the last 20 years--but that's the problem. It's a tradition of informal exchange, wrought with high emotion, that has developed in our society in recent times--during the last 20 years. In late 1970s discourse people did not, in general, just walk into a room and start ordering everyone in it around. But not only Mendez does this in the movie; this virus of verbal imperative infiltrates all of the CIA scenes, and the captive members of the diplomatic corps pick up on the behavior on their own, in spite of their extreme isolation from the Washington group. No one knocks on a door before entering an office in this movie. No one excuses themselves or apologizes for interrupting another person who happens to be on the telephone. No one ever apologizes for telling another character to fuck off. All this is common in the contemporary era; was it really common in the 1970s? In the Intelligence Service? In the Diplomatic Corps?
Spend enough time thinking this way and you notice how trim and chiseled everyone's facial features are in the movie--how free of blemishes and scars they all are--how muscular and defined, how balanced their weight is. How they all seem either too tan or not tan enough. How much product is in their hair. This is the era of Star War Episode IV. I haven't checked recently, but I doubt if even George Lucas can go back and digitally remove the natural frizz of all the hair in that movie. Even done up to the nines, people wore their hair then like Farrah Fawcett, not like Megan Fox. But everyone in Argo wears their hair like Megan Fox.
Is it the callout of the old Warner Bros logo on the front of the movie that makes me think this way? Does it draw undue attention to all these frustrating omissions of detail? I think even genuine supporters of this movie would have to admit that the buildup of these missing details begins to look towards larger errors. It's only a step from worrying about hair product and clothes to worrying about things like behavior and body language. And no one in Argo manages to approximate the gentler body language of the movie's time period. Instead, every actor asserts themselves; proud, confident--fronting their "rep" and their need to capture attention within the architecture of the modern thriller. People in the film carry themselves with contemporary confidence and modern ego, not realizing that in the era of the film there was a considerably different standard of address and behavior. It was an era in which people's positions in society meant more than an individual's lone attitude--especially in places like, oh, the Diplomatic Corps and the CIA--this atmosphere is something that films as diverse as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Boogie Nights get exactly right, and which Argo flubs from top to bottom. People of that time period were conscious first of their effect upon others; people in the diplomatic corps would have been particularly trained in the sort of "grace under pressure" that emphasizes the value of other people's feelings.
More than this, though, the movie's characters hardly seem alive to begin with. We know practically nothing about our potential hostages. Where have their personalities gone? How did the couples meet? Are their relationships working or are they clashing? Why have they even gotten together with one another? The older man--how does he relate to the others? He ceases to be their leader rather abruptly--the second scene we see he in he appears drained of vitality, and he drifts from there. While it may be realistic that the trauma of the situation has degraded these people to states of shock and mind-numbing terror, the fact that these people are never characterized is a very loose end in the movie. It allows us to care very little about their fates, just as it excuses us from sympathizing with their fears. And it nearly removes any potential source of tension the movie seeks to create.
And now it's time to say that this "thriller" is not really suspenseful. It is noisy, full of incoherent, screaming crowds and the sounds of car engines roaring and glass braking. But the film never creates a palpable sense of tension, and it fails to build the tension it has to a charged climax. That's why the picture needs the very theatrical 11th-hour chase at the end--the chase which almost everyone contributing to the thread has admitted feels like a very generic movie addendum to the history being shown. And that chase is fairly ridiculous, because it happens virtually after-the-fact. The erstwhile objects of the chase--the escapees from the Embassy--never discover that they are being pursued, and once again there is simply no emotional involvement in what goes on with them, because they are never characters to begin with.
In addition, the film has extreme problems in terms of the clarity of its action. Each suspenseful scene is convoluted by the way the action is played out in several different locations across the world, in different time zones and involving people who have extremely varied degrees of involvement in the action taking place. The film doesn't explain to the viewer very well how the action in these different places impacts the "events on the ground" in Iran, just as the film fails to create any real sense of anticipation at key moments of suspense. Never is it clearly diagrammed for us in advance what Mendez's choices and options might be, or what the Bryan Cranston character might be able to do to turn things around when his bosses decide the operation is a wash. When these characters do leap into action, we are meant to respond to the fury of their physical movements rather than our intimate knowledge of their feelings, their intellectual resources, or the choices they may have at their disposal. And so the suspense of the movie is condensed and minimized and brought to focus only around key scenes; the fugitives are in danger exclusively when they're out in the open, and that's when the suspense starts grinding its gears. The rest of the time we spend trying to piece together the relationships between this plot movement in Hollywood and this other plot movement in Washington and this relative lull happening in Iran at presumably the same approximate time. Whereas the real, historical fugitives lived out these days in terror--and not just the fugitives, but the Canadian Ambassador who shielded them and his family. And Mendez was at risk every day he was on the ground in Iran. But we hardly feel all these risks the characters are taking, and the actors hardly seem to register danger except in the key moments.
What if, instead of concocting an elaborate scene of action around the airstrip at the end, someone had seen fit to put that kind of dramatic ingenuity to work on the film that precedes the chase? What if we the viewers were introduced to the entire scenario in a different way? What if, instead of an information dump, followed by 3 or 4 days of condensed tension, we had a movie which gradually developed a sense of the real terror of these people's predicament? What if we grew to understand what was happening gradually, as a) the fugitives themselves must have done in the midst of these galvanizing historic events, and b) the CIA must have done as well, with their access to information limited and hampered (how does the CIA get its constant, on-the-minute updates about what is happening right next door to the hostage crisis on the other side of the globe)? Almost immediately we have outlined for us the full severity of what might happen in this potential hostage scenario (that seemingly quite relevant fact--that a real hostage scenario was playing out right next door {one which described rather clearly what might happen to the fugitive Americans if they were apprehended} is hardly exploited by the film as a source of suspense). What if the film played out in more select scenes, over a longer period of time?
What if the picture began months before the revolution, and, rather than being subjected to one of the worst narrations ever to feature in a Hollywood film, we were given information slowly, encounter by encounter? What if, as it becomes clear that the revolution is happening, we begin to gradually focus on individuals, and only at the point when the embassy is invaded do we realize that we have been focusing on these specific individuals because they are the ones who will escape the hostage crisis, and become our main characters? What if we stay with them longer, and learn more about them, and grow to care about what they think and feel?
I suggest this because I think the structure of the film reveals one of its most serious problems; Affleck and company have identified the suspense structure of the film essentially as a pursuit. That's why the scenes of hiding remain completely inert. But shouldn't those scenes be fraught with tension? Aren't these fugitive Americans engaged during that period of hiding in mastering the elaborate pretense of becoming not just Canadian, but also filmmakers? I have heard Mendez in an interview, describing the different things he did with the 6 escapees to create this illusion. It included altering people's hairlines, training them in particular body language, transforming their wardrobe and their manner of speech. Mendez goes into the kind of minute detail that they had to address to maintain the illusion--in the movie Affleck tells us and the escapees that if they screw up they're dead. In a 20-minute interview, Mendez illuminates a nerve-shredding trial, entirely in the details of method and practice. These people not only had to suppress their fears and panic--they had to also remember how to be completely different people, and make a convincing show of it! The true source of suspense in the picture ought to be that elaborate ruse; the becoming of this other person, and the maintenance of that illusion. We should see the escapees undergoing this transformation. We should see them changing before us; if we are with them though that process--if we understand them, identify with them, and see that they are beginning to have the hope of succeeding--then all the suspense in the world is ready and waiting for us when the fugitives go into the airport. And if all that was done well, there wouldn't be any need for the crazed pursuit of the plane on the runway: rather, the challenge would be simply getting through the gate, and the reward would be getting on the plane. I imagine any one of the real people who went through that situation would agree with that estimate.
What if we were shown the revolution happening, rather than be told about it? All it might take is two or three well-made scenes, where the information filters in to us, rather than being dumped in our laps. What if we met our fugitive characters before they went into panic-mode? Then we'd have a stake. We'd care about these people, and we'd have a clearer sense of what might be waiting for them out of their hiding place. We'd know how afraid they would be to leave the Ambassador's house, because we'd feel the source of their fear ourselves. What if Mendez's challenge was one of imagination, and the feat of determination and ingenuity it takes to make your transformative vision felt by other people? Mendez is essentially making a movie with these people--he's going through so many of the key phases of that process. He's creating a plausible dream that will involve the Iranian revolutionary army in his illusion the way a good movie involves an audience. What if that irony was actually central to the movie, instead of a sort of a glib sidebar? All the Hollywood people do in the picture is tell Affleck "good job" and then go wait by the phone to do their one little bit of corroboration. To hear Mendez talk of it in real life, you know that this process was so much more involved than the movie admits. As actors, the true fugitives were more at risk than Klaus Kinski, possessed by a role--in fact, the risk involved in their performance is more on the level of John Wilkes Booth, where they are laying their lives on the line, in a role. And these people were so ill-equipped to begin to play this illusion. There is so much opportunity for genuine suspense in the creation and the sustaining force of this illusion, that the actual suspense left in the movie--CIA cold feet and the furious mugging of the Iranian security guards--is dispiritingly flimsy.
As a final note, I have to say that Ben Affleck gives us an extremely dull portrait of Mendez. Mendez is the director; in a sense he's the director of the whole shebang; but Affleck only gives Mendez one scene in which he rehearses identities with the escapees. At no point in the film does Affleck himself come across as anything other than a tense, imperiled CIA guy. With his pained inability to crack a smile, Affleck is actually the weakest link in the group of pretend filmmakers that walk through the airport. Not that he has ever claimed to be much of an actor (though he does expect us to pay to see him; there's a little conundrum there worth some additional reflection). But this portrayal of Mendez--not just Affleck's conception of him, but the written take on the character as well--misses a very obvious point about this guy, which you can see very clearly in the photograph somebody posted of the real Mendez earlier in the thread: that Mendez clearly loved doing the job. He wasn't slouching his way through the assignment, drinking and awkwardly sucking in his breath; Mendez was directing these people. He was maintaining equilibrium in this nearly beseiged house while he trained 6 novices hiding there to act; all the while he worked on their wardrobe, their hair, and he coached them in appropriate body language. He drilled them like a demon--like a Von Stroheim, a Von Sternberg of a Mizoguchi. And let's not forget that in Mendez we have the mogul who thought up this entire crazy scheme. The premise of Argo is not routine tactical thinking: it's grandiose and absurd. It's the stuff dreams are made of. Look at the photograph of the real Mendez, posed by the airplane. Is this not the face of a guy mad for adventure, for story and magic? The theatrical nature of this spy game came directly from Mendez--and we see none of that in Affleck himself.
To me this movie misses the boat in ways large and small. It's a film as indifferent to the quality of its performances as it is unleavened by inspired camerawork or by involved art direction. The film fails to create a tone or atmosphere of suspense--even though the historical record supplies nifty, readymade tropes in that regard, which are truly hard to miss. As a result, the suspense of the film is routine, entirely recycled from film and television of the last fifteen or so years. The picture as a whole is weakened by this generic approach, for in the premise of the film is a natural thriller, whose actual qualities of tension are unique and clearly detailed...and wholly ignored by the authors of the film. As a resultant side-note, I have to observe that we viewers know not very much more about the revolution in Iran when the film is over, save for our general knowledge culled from Schwarzenneger films, Dolph Lundgren movies and the like: that the Persians are generally wide-eyed and screaming mad at all times, and likely dangerous enemies. All told, the film is a missed opportunity to approach a challenging period of history with an enlightened, informative mindset, and a foiled attempt to capture the genuine fear and turmoil of being caught in the middle of a revolution you barely understand, and which to escape from you will be required to transform yourself completely--to learn to be another person. And there is not a worthwhile performance in this film, nor a well-realized scene. There is no real thrill to be had, and no education to gather. I can see why people hate it. I don't actually hate the movie, but I don't think, as Argo gathers its awards this awards season, that it really deserves any of them.
