I
always enjoy it when movies do more than one thing well. Ben Affleck’s
third directorial effort (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is a three-for-one. In the first, shortest sequence, it is
a docudrama (incorporating news footage) showing, in 1979, Iranian
revolutionaries taking over the American
embassy. The mass hostage-taking that followed was the year’s top
foreign-policy story and, perhaps, the thing that lost Jimmy Carter
re-election.
The flight, in secret, of a handful of embassy employees to
the nearby Canadian embassy is a lesser-known story
that makes perfect fodder for an elliptical thriller, with a rescue plan
that was literally straight out of Hollywood. The satirical midsection
would not be ought of place in Get Shorty. John Goodman
and Alan Arkin play the colorful movie folks
who helped produce the operation, the details of which are too amusing to
recount.
But then Affleck, who plays the CIA operative who arranges the
whole plan and sells it to his agency superiors, deftly pivots again and
shows the operation in action in a most suspenseful
way. He pays attention to the individual hostages, who included a
married couple and one man who is heavily skeptical of the plan, which
requires them to play, among other things, Canadians.
The script, while
not perfectly fidelitous to history, particularly in the third act, gets some points for casting, as can be seen in the photographs of the
actual hostages, looking remarkably like the actors who portray them (as does the John Goodman character). The story is based on a book by Tony Mendez, Affleck’s character, with a screenplay by Chris Terrio. It’s a fine blend of Hollywood thrills and nervous tension, with a
touch of comedy.
viewed 11/4/2012 2:05 pm at Ritz 16 NJ; review posted 2/21/2013
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