ARGO

Ben Affleck restored Hollywood’s faith the moment he took the director’s chair. For Argo, his third film, he took a gamble, went bigger and completely different. In the end, his take on the Iran hostage crisis turned out to be a new direction for political film and an endlessly entertaining thriller. It is also the first self-examination of the power of movies in geopolitics, something Hollywood knew very early on, but never took to the mirror.

            The story of how the six American hostages were rescued from the Canadian embassy in Iran after the revolution of 1979 by Tony Mendez, a technical operations officer for the CIA, under the guise of being a film crew scouting locations was open for filming since 1997 when President Clinton declassified the story in honor of the CIA’s 50^th anniversary. But not even Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA, Mendez’s 1999 book detailing the account, drew much interest. 

            It wasn’t until 2007 that an article on Wired magazine entitled The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran caught Hollywood’s eye. It was bought up by George Clooney and Grant Heslov through their Smoke House banner on behalf of Warner Bros. and Affleck jumped on board early in 2011.  By September of that year, he began shooting in Los Angeles, with further shooting to be done in Istanbul.

            Maybe Argo was a film Affleck thought he needed to make or, maybe, he saw relevancy in the 1979 revolution to the present state of Iran but, whatever his inspiration, Affleck poured his soul into his first foray into international relations. He took his studies in Middle Eastern affairs and put Warner’s $44 million budget to good use, though the Academy ultimately snubbed him of a Best Director nomination, sending shock and outrage among other Oscar favorites like Quentin Tarantino.

            It was a curious path for Affleck, to be sure. Although a favorite guest of TV pundits, Affleck is, by Hollywood standards, relatively silent about politics. But international relations is but one of the many faces of Argo. If anything, the movie is in tune with Affleck’s apolitical public persona, sidestepping commentary and in-depth background to the Iranian Revolution beyond a brief mention of the role of the United States and Great Britain, with the help of the Shah, in the 1953 coup that led to the overthrowing of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The Shah’s own mixed legacy is also avoided. An opening narration mentions (not credits, and the distinction is important), Pahlavi’s push toward Westernization with photographs of women finding open doors in medical fields as evidence. It then states as fact that this newfound liberation enraged the clerical population, which revolted and abolished the Iranian monarchy and established Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader, while the Shah, dying of cancer, found asylum in the United States. A sign of Affleck’s fairness, however, is his mention of other causes leading to the Iranian Revolution, including the Shah’s life of decadence while millions of his subjects died of malnourishment. With unusual subtlety, the opening narration juxtapositions both contradictory claims, the Shah’s corruption and his (albeit complicated) support for women’s liberation, without transition or comment. In the end, the question is whether the Shah’s push toward Westernization was the result of a genuine desire to move the country forward or the move of puppet under the guidance of empirical powers. Argo simply presents both truths as probable causes for a national uprising.

            Even the costume designer Jacqueline West discovered when researching garments, “The women of Iran had been wearing Western clothes, because the shah had been encouraging it, but they all had to go back under the black chador, which became known as the ‘flag of the revolution’. But they were running out of fabric in Tehran, so women were dyeing tablecloths, bedspreads, and over-dyeing print fabrics with black.”

            Argo is above pointing fingers, its opening narration and photos serving the purpose of a newsreel. The main body of the film reads quite differently, though, being obviously pro-American without being anti-Iranian in the typical propagandistic sense. Certainly, with the storm then brewing over the dismissal of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, Argo takes a nobler path. At best, the film’s portrayal of Iranians grants them an otherness that to naïve, if well-meaning, Americans presents a shock. They are often filmed in angry mobs, such as the opening scene when they storm the US Embassy in Tehran (a scene modeled on real pictures), or when they swarm the car carrying the American hostages, or when one of the Americans posing as a member of the film crew unintentionally provokes the ire of a shopkeeper at the bazaar.

            Affleck used close-ups for the Iranians seen individually or in small groups, lingering on their sullen looks, hinting at the danger of angering them. The revolutionary guard at the airport, for instance, looks more threatening than he would without forced close-ups, but what his scene does handle well is the language barrier, which creates deeper panic to the hostages attempted to flee and the audience. Affleck is smart to minimize the use of subtitles, even when a hostage fluent in Farsi takes over the conversation, and makes great use of the verbal confusion.

 If this smacks of xenophobia it’s important to remember that the perception of Iranians for most, if not all, of the six American hostages held in Tehran was based on what the media reported and the initial seizure of the embassy from which they escaped.

Tehran itself is depicted as a city of dread and terror, with lifeless bodies dangling from construction cranes in public view. Tony Mendez’s arrival in the city makes for one of the movie’s most unforgettable moments. The brief stretch shows some of Affleck’s best editing yet as he cross-cuts between the horrors of the streets and the controlled fear evident on Mendez’s face.

The film’s attitude toward the revolution was best described by American diplomat John Limbert, “Argo highlights the negative attitudes that the two countries have held toward each other for decades. Its brief introduction attempts to provide historical context behind the embassy takeover, but the film does not convey the prevailing Iranian sense of grievance — real or imagined — that led to the 1979 attack, and to the emotional response in the streets of Tehran . . . More than three decades later, the same atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust, and festering wounds dominates Iranian-American relations.”

True enough, the reaction to the film in Iran was mixed at best with the kindest words being mere tolerance for the film. The most eloquent critic was Masoumeh Ebteker who became the mouth-piece for the revolutionary guards. All things considered, her response to the film was composed and collected, writing only that Argo didn’t, “provide sufficient resources to the real reasons behind the event. Now, retrospectively, when we look at the takeover, many former students think that a 444-day hostage-taking was too long. And perhaps if circumstances would have been different at the time, maybe events would have unfolded differently.”
Mark Lijek, one of the six rescued hostages, who had studied Farsi for six months before arriving in Iran in 1979 would later offer some insight into the motivation behiond the revolt and storming of the embassy. He realizes the revolt was complicated, saying that when he was first offered the position in 1978, thing in iran were already "pretty bad." But the core reason behind the attack of the embassy was America's protection of the Shan.
"Mainly the protest was because America had chosen to admit the Shah for medical treatment," Lijek said. "The consular building, where Cora [his wife and fellow hostage] and I worked, was at least five minutes from the main chancery building and had its own door onto the street. The people who broke in forgot about us or initially didn't much care."
For his own part, Lijek thought the early scenes of the attack on the embassy were vivid and emotive, striking close to home, "It was almost the first time I'd thought deeply about what it must have been like for the 50 or so Americans in the main building."

The most surprising comments came from Saeed Kamali Dehghan in The Guardian, claiming that as an Iranian, Argo helped him see another side of the story.

“What troubles me most is how the film reminds me of Iran's history, of how a group of my countrymen betrayed Iran, took a group of people hostage and brought pain and trauma to another country for 444 days, “ he said. “For years at school I was taught that the hostage-taking of American diplomats was an act of resistance, heroism on behalf of revolutionaries showing their anger at US interference in Iran's internal affairs.

Argo suddenly wipes out all that revolutionary rhetoric and reminds me of the other side of the story. It shows the yellow ribbons in the streets of Washington DC, the anguish and pain caused by the incident, and it makes me regret what happened more than 30 years ago.

Affleck's film may depict an Iran I hardly recognize but it is a bitter reminder of how young revolutionaries and their leaders failed their country, putting Iran in a crisis that has had consequences for its people to this day.In reaction to the film, some of the hostage-takers have defended what happened after 1979. But Argo should make them reflect and at least face up to the reality.”

And yet, Affleck does present another side of Iran, but there’s a catch. The respectability of Iranians is measured by their loyalty to the American cause. Sahar (Sheila Vand), Ken Taylor’s housemaid, gradually becomes aware of the true identity to the Ambassador’s houseguests. She proves herself worthy of rising above vilification when she risks her life by concealing their identity to a revolutionary guard.

This interaction does open up a valid point of discussion, however. Why did so many women defend Ayatollah Khomeini after he revoked the freedom granted to them by the Shah? Such questions are beyond the scope of this movie, but they do provide an interesting subtext to Sahar’s decision.

As Jian Ghomeshi said writing for Globe and Mail, “Would it be instructive to learn more about why young Iranian people were resentful of the United States housing the dictatorial Shah they’d worked to overthrow? Might it be helpful to explain that not all Iranians were Islamic formalists who supported Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini? Or that the revolution was a popular one that originally included liberal democrats, feminists, nationalists, socialists and workers – a revolution that was co-opted by the mullahs and extremists to lead to the Islamic Republic that we know today? Even if the film’s scope is reductive in its treatment of the revolution, the individual Iranian characters themselves might have been written with a lighter hand, leaving room for nuance. But Argo is a popcorn thriller that doesn’t sweat these details. If there’s any attention to nuance, it’s not about Iranians.”

By contrast, the scenes set on American soil have tranquility and a sense of national unity for a country pulling itself together for the safe return of the hostages. Within our borders, serenity is disturbed only by family dramas, like Tony Mendez’s separation from his wife and his distance from his son. The government offices run with chaos, panic, and flying tempers that were undoubtedly present when news of the hostages hit home. But the officials are, in the end, hushed by the patriotic finale of the kind that would have made John Ford smile.

All in all, however, Argo is a commendably balanced film, free of overt nationalism or dehumanization of the enemy. More could have been made, perhaps, of its take on geopolitics, but that is just one the film’s facets. It’s at least as much a comment on the power of the movies in the real world. It celebrates that power and credits it for helping to resolve the hostage crisis peacefully. But it also embraces the movies as a unifying force, temporarily turning the Iranian revolutionary guards into harmless grinning saps, swept away by the magic of cinema and the fake movie’s ludicrous script. Even though the narrow escape at the airport was the movie’s invention for the sake of suspense, it was under the guise of a film crew that Mendez was able to sneak the hostages out. In both Affleck’s rendition of the mission and in its real-life counterpart a case could be made that it was cinema’s universal appeal that saved the day. Argo is, then, more of a cheer for Hollywood than America.

It’s an affectionate embrace of Hollywood, even with the movie’s unflattering depiction of the town after its glamour had long vanished. Hollywood’s second golden age had ended suddenly when ripping-off Star Wars became the new trend. Argo offers few hints of Hollywood’s glittery past, representing its current state by the crumbling letters of the iconic Hollywood sign that once loomed over a dream factory. It’s an anachronism (the sign was restored in 1978) that serves a function. The state of Hollywood that led to the sign’s decay hadn’t changed. The city below was still a land of studios stocked to their necks with ridiculous costumes and piles of unproduced trashy scripts. When it came to science fiction cinema, the Spielbergs and the Lucases were few and far between. “Argo” itself, an erotic tale of space travel, was just one of many in an unfortunate trend.

And yet, there was a use even for this kind of celluloid trash. In fact, the very nature of the fake film may have helped the plan. American produced sci-fi, silly as much of it was, translated far more easily in foreign markets and nothing would have worked better for distracting airport guards than storyboards with improbable spaceships.

Elsewhere, the garish colors of 70s Hollywood and the brutality overseas seem like irreconcilable bedfellows. In the film’s best moment, Affleck cross-cuts the violence in Iran and threats by militant leaders with a press luncheon for the fake movie, attended by dozens of oddballs and thespians in bizarre outfits. This is also the most vivid reflection of the movie’s duality from political thriller to spy spoof. The change is marked as soon as the location changes to Hollywood. Affleck made a wise decision by making John Goodman (playing make-up artist John Chambers) the first actor we see in the new locale. Goodman’s presence is so often a marker of warm self-parodying humor it feels like a cut into a different film entirely after the harrowing tale we’ve just witnessed. Indeed, the Hollywood scenes move in a different sphere than the rest of the film, but Affleck’s cross-cut scene brings them together for one electrifying moment, a roller-coaster of emotions where the horrors of Tehran seem to accent Arkin’s dry wit half-way around the world. But the world of phony movies and silly masks will have to come to the world of very real danger and, by the end of Argo, will have turned, as Siegel and Chambers observe, a potential tragedy into a farce.

Affleck and Jacqueline West were careful, however, not to extend Hollywood’s tackiness with that of the period, which they chose to tone down.

“Costume designer Jacqueline West shared with me the goal of not having the 70s thing upstage the movie,” Affleck said. “I didn’t want to have just fur coats and bell bottoms, Shaft, to communicate the period. It’s a period that could very easily be exploited for comedy, so you have to be really ginger about what you do. There’s a laugh waiting behind every haircut.”

But the most endearing quality of Affleck’s Hollywood is its ability to kid itself. John Chambers (Goodman) knows how over the top many of the movies his talent went to were. During a walk through the set of a particularly dumb-looking make-up extravaganza Chambers takes an amicable nudge at one of the actors behind his own mask, “If he could act he wouldn’t be playing a minotaur.”

Lester Siegel, the cantankerous pulp producer played with very funny verve by Alan Arkin, is well aware that his glory days have passed, sarcastically mentioning that he’s up for a Lifetime Achievement Award. But both Chambers and Siegel stayed on in the city that nurtured their art because they love their work even if, in Siegel’s case, it cost him a relationship with his daughters. They see the dreck their talents are put toward, but love the craft and the town thrives on it. They accept the “Argo” mission largely because their skills are finally being put to a worthy cause.

Argo is Affleck’s most unique film to date and, in some ways, his greatest. Its liberty with the facts of the case is noted, and the offense taken by both Great Britain and New Zealand at the false suggestion that both embassies turned the hostages away is not unjustified. Great Britain had, indeed, sheltered them until the embassy was deemed unsafe and the hostages moved.

Arthur Wyatt, the British charge d’affiars in Tehran was quick to express his dismay, “The Americans who had escaped from their embassy fetched up at our summer compound in northern Tehran, and I think they stayed there for one night before moving on to the Canadians. If it had been discovered we were helping them I can assure you we'd all have been for the high jump. We were living on our nerves and under constant threat. The revolutionary regime ignored all the rules of diplomatic protection and the Vienna Convention. When they over-ran our embassy too, I said to one of them: 'You can't do this; we're diplomats.' He just waved his machine pistol around and replied: 'This is what matters.'" ”

 Similarly, Richard Sewell, second secretary at the New Zealand embassy risked his own life driving the hostages to the airport, a fact the film, it should be mentioned, neither confirms nor denies; the ride to the airport is jumped over.

Affleck himself was critical of the movie’s deceptions and expressed regret over the treatment of Great Britain and New Zealand, saying, “I struggled with this long and hard because it casts Britain and New Zealand in a way that is not totally fair. But I was setting up a situation where you needed to get a sense that these six people had nowhere else to go. It does not mean to diminish anyone."

Strangely, though, inaccuracies are forgivable, if not part of the point, in a movie about Hollywood’s fabrication of facts. Argo celebrates the reality created by cinema rather than the true reality which inspires it. Argo is not the first movie to claim its basis on a true story. It is the first to acknowledge the necessity of altering facts not within the film itself, but by its very nature, a story about the movies ability to transform reality.

Of all people, Jimmy Carter described the best way to approach the film’s take on reality, “Well, let me say first of all, it’s a great drama. And I hope it gets the Academy Award for best film because I think it deserves it. The other thing that I would say was that 90 percent of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian. And the movie gives almost full credit to the American CIA. And with that exception, the movie is very good.”

If it does nothing else, its shift from reality makes for great entertainment. The smooth departure from the airport is hardly the stuff of good cinema. Their race against the clock as their identities are discovered, however, makes for a rousing climax.

“There is a catharsis when the plane takes off. To create that in cinematic form requires a lot of amp-up and drama to replicate what the house guests might have felt at that moment,” said screenwriter Chris Terrio.

 Lester Siegel was an invented character, but without him we would have been denied one of Alan Arkin’s most delightful performances. Mendez was neither separated from his wife nor reported to be having marital problems of any sort at the time of the mission, but the backstory gives Affleck’s Mendez an emotive hook.

To get Argo done Affleck had to sell the story and the facts of it, as they stood, weren’t going to convince the heads at Warner Bros.

“It’s hard to make a movie and you wanna jam everything that’s possible in there,” he said. “Particularly given, one of the really nice things about this movie was the spirit of camaraderie and brotherhood and companionhood that developed between the United States and Canada.”

He had to change the reality of the situation. Tony Mendez would know what he went through, that was the only way he was able to get the hostages out of Iran.

THE TOWN

The Town is more a companion piece than a follow up to Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. It doesn’t aim as deep but still manages to prove thoughtful questions about ethics and, if anything, further erases the line between good guys and bad guys. It’s also a first-rate thriller with its cast in great form, including Affleck himself who takes the lead as Doug MacRay, a professional armed robber with a conscience or, at least, an eye for the delicate vulnerability of Claire (Rebecca Hall) the young bank manager he takes ransom with his cronies and then falls for.

            If Doug sounds too good to be true, a sort of lovable rogue, the movie never stoops so low as to make him something of a thief with a heart of gold or a Robin Hood. He can be, when the need arises, as violent as his associates. Doug’s distinction is that he is more level-headed than the explosive Jem, played by Jeremy Renner capturing both the charisma and the ferocity of James Cagney at his finest. Jem’s temper often impairs his judgment and leads to his demise during a fool-hardy stand-off with the FBI, adding him to the hall-of-fame of hoods killed when their hot-head got a little too big for their britches. But unlike the whacking of Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, a humiliating demise for such a mean little monster, Jem goes out guns blazing like Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces and White Heat.

            Ostensibly, Doug and Jem are at opposite ends of their posse’s violence spectrum (the other two are largely left blank), but when they’re robbing a bank or hijacking a truck, their masks make them virtually indistinguishable in more than a physical sense. In that moment they are equally dangerous, essentially the same person. The intelligence of The Town is similar to that of Gone Baby Gone in that they are both rooted in Malcolm Gladwell’s definition of good and bad as described in The Tipping Point. Affleck never defines his characters in absolute terms. When simply kicking around Charlestown, Doug may be more pleasant than Jem, but if you are a driver for an armored truck they hijack, you wouldn’t want to push your luck with neither one of them. When on a heist, both men are monsters (their grotesque masks become our literal interpretation of them) but to really understand who Doug is and who Jem it is necessary to see them without the masks.

            As such we are easily taken to Doug. Without our foreknowledge he seems like a decent guy, hard-working enough at his day job, struggling to make amends with his incarcerated father and the mother that left him when he was a child, and his feelings for Claire do seem sincere. Jem is far more vicious, but is he any less human? He honors his allegiance to his neighborhood (not only a reoccurring theme in Affleck’s movies but also his benchmark for evaluating someone’s respectability) and does his best for his sister (Blake Lively) and his little nephew, pushing Doug to fulfill his obligation to them. As awful as his crimes may be, they are born from his concern for his pals. It may be a relief to see Jem meet his end and, in the hands of a filmmaker interested primarily in shock value, that may well have been the pay-off. But Affleck is too thoughtful a director for easy emotions and cuts instead to the pained look on Doug’s face to remind us that our gut response to the death of this thug should not come so easily. Doug is, after all, watching someone who was, essentially, his brother, get gunned down by “the enemy”. On a certain level we have a classic tragedy, a fearless criminal goes down fighting; the only response he ever learned. That is the real tragedy of The Town, not Doug’s separation from Claire when he finally escapes Charlestown. At least in the theatrical cut, Doug’s saga ends triumphantly when he makes it out to the country (again shot in the soothing pastoral colors, contrasting sharply with the cold narrow streets of the city), haunted by the life he left behind in Boston.

            Further marring our cheer at the death of Jem is Affleck’s regard for the FBI. One of them, Dino (Titus Welliver, part of Affleck’s stock cast) committed the cardinal sin of the streets by ratting on his own people to rise to the top. From the perspective of Doug and his gang, and The Town (much like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Terrence Malik’s Badlands) invites us into this perspective without apology, Dino is less honorable than Doug’s father (Chris Cooper),  who is serving time for murdering two armored truck drivers during a heist gone bad but at least didn’t point fingers toward his associates and, in the words of Doug’s buddies, “went to jail with his head up.”

            Even the best of the FBI, Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm in a terrific performance) is, at the end of the day, a guy who wants to catch the bad guys so he can, as Doug puts it, “pump his supper.” The key words here are “bad guys”, but who are they really? A more accurate question is, who really are the good guys? Frawley does his job well, but neither he nor his colleagues are above bullying and coercion when the going gets tough. Still, we almost want Doug to walk into their trap at the end and we feel cheated, slightly, when Doug evades them.

            Affleck is as skilled at playing with his audience as anyone, constantly shifting our allegiance in rapid succession. The ending of The Town is no exception. When the FBI accepts defeat, recognizing they were duped by a criminal, the ending becomes decidedly anti-climactic, the bad guy got away. But given that he’s lost everything from Claire, to his family, and his lifestyle, Doug’s escape to the lake is a bittersweet ending at best.

            Affleck plays with perspective quite a bit, starting with the opening bank robbery. Typically, our gaze would be at eye-level with the hostages, the camera allowing us to share in the panic of the moment. But Affleck shows the action from the robbers’ viewpoint, making us partakers in the heist and, in a voyeuristic sense, complicit in the crime. In the now famous scene in which the hoods rob a bank in the North End wearing nun masks, the effect is even more taunting. We are put off by the gruesome disguises, the brutality of their crime (a loud guard gets shot), and their general nature. But then an interesting thing happens. After a savage chase with the police through the narrow streets of Boston’s North End, the robbers arrive at a construction site where their ridiculous disguises catch the suspicion of a police detail. Instantly, we change sides and hope they can still get away. We’ve seen them get away with so much already…

             This shifting of perspective may be Affleck’s strongest tool on his rise to auteur filmmaking. After all, his films take place in a world where villains and heroes don’t exist. His characters are defined as they relate to those around them, friend or foe. In The Town, even Claire evades easy labels. There is poignancy in her forgiveness of Doug after she learns of his true identity and there is something to be said for her loyalty to him, but she did have to work against the law to help him escape. She’s an admirable person in many ways. Recovering from her traumatic experience she continues to dedicate her time to the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club, a home for otherwise doomed inner-city kids of the sort Doug used to be. We can legitimately applaud her for donating the loot Doug leaves her to the restoration of the club’s ice rink, but it was stolen money.

            If there is pure evil in The Town it’s Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite in one of his last film appearances), the Irish mobster who has commanded the neighborhood crime ring for generations using a floral shop as a front. Because his crime extended to the people of the neighborhood (a twist we learn later), he is denied a dignified death.

            Though virtually no mention has been made of it, Hitchcock’s influence on Affleck is impossible to miss. Hitch loved to taunt the audience, most famously in Psycho but examples abound (including Dial M for Murder), and would often lead us right into the villain’s point-of-view before we even realized what the old master was doing. Hitch’s concept of suspense is also present in The Town. Look at how well mounted Doug and Claire’s encounter with Jem early in the film is. Jem’s tattoo (spotted by Claire during the kidnapping) could be a giveaway. The tension, however, is twofold. Can Claire identify Jem by the tattoo and, more complicated, do we want her to? If she does, what will that mean for Doug (who we are conflicted about in the first place) and, also, for her now that Jem has conclusive reason for fearing her? This is first-rate suspense of the sort Hitchcock loved. The tattoo dilemma blows over and ultimately amounts to little more than a McGuffin, but it creates a brilliant scene of discomfort for both Doug and Jem, the looks on their faces telling us exactly what they are thinking despite the words Claire hears them say. Doug knows that Jem knows who Claire is and that he feels betrayed by Doug romancing her. Doug knows he will have a lot to answer for (may be even to Claire if things play out that way) and the results may be explosive. Affleck keeps the dialogue tense and curt, keeping us in suspense about who will giveaway who until the scene fizzles out.

            As close to home as the material seems to have been for Affleck, he was not the first director on board when Graham King of Initial Entertainment Group brought the screenplay to Warner Bros. in 2006. Adapted from Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel Prince of Thieves, the screenplay was the work of Sheldon Turner and Adrian Lyne was slated to direct. But Turner’s script and Lyne’s vision were too long and too expensive for Warner, who was hoping to spend around the $37 million mark on the film.

            Inspired by the critical success of Gone Baby Gone and Affleck’s knowledge of the ways of life in Boston, Warner offered Affleck the project in 2008. He took it, however, with some hesitation, “I didn’t know how to direct somebody else’s movie. For better or worse, it had to be a movie that I personally researched and understood.”

            It is a bit surprising how slowly Affleck took to the project in its early stages, recounting his experience, “There was no inner smoothness for me. Fear and anxiety for me is a really good motivator. I’ve worked as hard as I’ve ever worked on anything, maybe harder, because failure wasn’t really an option.”

            What helped Affleck most was both the collaboration of the FBI and talks with the people of Charlestown.

            “We’d get 1,000 people to come in, and out of that there’d be like 20 interesting people whom I’d do follow-up interviews with,” he said. “That proved to be a gold mine in terms of material I could use.”

            Upon taking over the project, Affleck handed the screenplay over to childhood friend Aaron Stockard who had helped bring such a sense of authenticity to Gone Baby Gone, who also found the Townies’ stories useful for developing Doug and his gang, “These guys were really ballsy and brazen. It was exciting to know that we could write these characters big and ambitious, because they were.”

            Not all Townies were flattered by the film’s depiction of their home, however.

            “This is based on a book by a guy from Canton brought to the big screen by a guy from Cambridge,” grumbled hockey defenseman and Charlestown native Jack O’Callahan. “When they were younger, they wouldn’t have crossed the bridge. There was an element of crime. Everyone knew it. But it didn’t bleed into the neighborhood. And those guys were pretty good parents who went to church on Sundays. They were gangsters, but they were good neighbors. This bit with a bunch of guys in nun’s habits running around with machine guns, I don’t know where that happened.”

            Defense for Affleck, Chuck Hogan, and the film itself came from an unsurprising source, Dennis Lehane, whose novels have formed the basis of Boston’s representation on the screen with Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Affleck’s own Gone Baby Gone, was quick to say, “We’re crime writers. If it comes between the truth and the legend, you print the legend, what works dramatically. I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the impulse of why people say, ‘You’re painting us all this way’ just because you’re setting something in one part of town.”

            Affleck and Stockard finished reshaping the screenplay in less than a month, got Warner’s approval, and began shooting by August of 2009.

            “The first week of the shoot, the stress was, ‘How are we going to pull this off?’”, said producer Basil Iwanyk. “This is a big, intense, emotional movie, with a big cast, and Ben’s in Boston, where he’s being pulled in a million different directions. How do we communicate notes? How does he interact with department heads when he’s in the middle of a huge, intense acting scene? Ultimately, we realized all our fears were unfounded. He had consistent good cheer, was open, would talk to anyone, was able to compartmentalize his acting and his directing.”

            In the end, the biggest challenge was not the climactic shootout during the disastrous heist at Fenway Park, but a way to wrap up the movie, telling of Affleck’s emphasis on emotional impact over adrenaline.

            “We couldn’t figure out if we wanted to do a brutal ending like The Departed or a really emotional ending,” Iwanyk said. “We had endings where he died, and people hated it. Then we had endings where, while they weren’t holding hands you had the sense that they lived happily ever after and audiences felt cheated by it.”

            The official ending (an alternate one was included in the extended edition Blu-ray disc) was the best one, a graceful compromise between somberness and optimism, a perfect ending to the story of a wasted life redeemed by loyalty and honor.

            Affleck is fast earning a place in the auteur hall of fame, even in the smallest details like establishing a stock cast (such as Victor Garber, seen here briefly as a bank manager, who would have a prominent role in Affleck’s next picture Argo). With The Town he continues his winning streak and proves himself a sure hand artist for psychological thrills. He took bigger ambitions to Argo but still retained his themes of erasing bold lines between good and evil, albeit on a geopolitical scale. In doing so he continued his winning streak and came up with a superior international thriller with a lollapalooza of a climax. 

GONE BABY GONE

           By the time Gigli came along, Ben Affleck’s days as a new Hollywood wonder boy were a distant memory. Gigli was just the coup de grâce, Armageddon, Forces of Nature, Reindeer Games, Pearl Harbor, and a tabloid romance with Jennifer Lopez had already dealt deathly blows. Was this the same young man who had made a promising start not long before with Good Will Hunting? And the over-the-top morbidity of Smokin’ Aces was yet to come!

            Soon after, however, Affleck did what no other movie laughing stock (has-been or otherwise) did before. He turned his career around completely with a single magnificent film. Gone Baby Gone shut down the mockery with one blow and proved Affleck one of the greats without even appearing on screen, but personalizing his directorial debut (not counting the obscure short I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney from 1993. The film was so bad, Affleck disowned, so it seems just to discount it from his oeuvre) as if he had been an auteur for years. And perhaps, in a spiritual sense, he was, since Boston has long been so close to his heart.

            One is tempted to compare him to Clint Eastwood, who was not taken seriously until he took the director’s chair, but what Affleck offers in Gone Baby Gone, and would offer again in The Town, was something that no one, not even his early supporters, foresaw.

            From the opening shots of Gone Baby Gone, spanning the characteristic triple-decker homes of Dorchester, Affleck gives us the first honest unpolished window into a side of Boston only the locals know of. No, not even Good Will Hunting, for all its calculations and involvement of locals, peered this deeply. To be fair, such depths were not to be expected of Good Will Hunting, but no filmmaker has ever looked past Beacon Hill. New York has Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee as alternative to Woody Allen’s elegant vision of the city and Los Angeles has few movie idolizers, but no filmmaker has ever paid attention to the Boston neighborhoods for which Back Bay may as well be part of another city.

            Clint Eastwood took the first step with his excellent Mystic River (also from Dennis Lehane), exploring a hidden world of secret connections and dark secrets, but working-class life in Southie was scrubbed so clean it remained simply an acknowledgement of its existence rather than an exploration, though it was the first step toward a true exposure.          

            Affleck holds nothing back, as though the opening narration by his brother Casey (who took the lead as the detective who knows the block as well as anyone), were his own words (and they are, he wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stockard), sharing his reason for making the movie. He shows us all, the drug addictions, the hushed murders, and robberies that have left a mark in in the history of South Boston. But few outsiders ever see this world and it’s no surprise why. Southie and Dorchester are tight communities that don’t like to share much with strangers. Cops, detectives, and investigators are often told to mind their business and locals who talk to them aren’t easily forgiven. Is it any wonder that Mayor Menino’s attempt to run the “Stop Snitchin’” campaign out of town met with so much resistance? When little Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brien) goes missing in this neighborhood, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck), working as a private detective on the streets that raised him, knows how hard it will be to break the silence.

            The first scenes of Gone Baby Gone follow a familiar noir pattern. Patrick and Angie (Michelle Monaghan), his partner and lover, visit the local bars, talk to the local sleaze hounds, and irritate the neighborhood strong-arms who enforce the code of silence.

            Because our attention is not yet turned away to the deeper implications of the mystery, our attention is captivated entirely by Casey Affleck’s superb performance. Having stayed out of the mainstream for much of his early career, he largely dodged the tabloid vultures. But if there was a perfect way to break into the world his older brother occupies, this is it. It’s a tough, sensitive performance. Patrick knows the ways of the neighborhood, its rules and dangers, and many of its secrets. He’s been hardened by life in the block where he was raised, but finds reason to care about the residents who have been less fortunate than he. In South Boston, your neighbors are always your people, no matter what you become. No doubt, this sentiment hits home for the Affleck brothers.

            As the investigation widens, deeper elements come into play, ending the film with a morality question for which there can be no easy answers. Patrick makes a case for what he believes to be the right choice, but whether he did right by taking Amanda from a loving home and back into the arms of her neglectful mother with a seeming affinity for dangerous men because that was the legal thing to do can be endlessly debated.

            Gone Baby Gone offers no easy answers because morality in this neighborhood is relative and everyone who lives there has their own definition of it. Helene (Amy Ryan), Amanda’s addict mother, is who she is and shows little sign of changing up until we last see her. Still, her concern for Amanda seems sincere, even if she is not above compromising her to fulfill a drug deal. Amanda’s Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) and Uncle Lionel (Titus Welliver) seem to genuinely love her, but her uncle’s resentment of his sister Helene takes precedent over Amanda’s safety. He claims to have done everything he is revealed to have done for her own good, but revenge seems that dominant motive.

            Detective Bressant, a bulldog investigator played by Ed Harris with a strong bite, joins the search and for most of the film we can forgive his hot-headedness and occasional overstepping of bounds because of his concern for children. His past, however, compromises him.

            He’s merciless when dispensing justice against child molesters, but his tactics aren’t always legal or ethical. But does that necessarily mean he is wrong? That’s one of the fundamental conflicts of Gone Baby Gone, what’s legal and what’s “right” and the irreconcilable differences between the two. Bressant’s answer to the charge “murder is always wrong” is, “depends who you do it to.”

            But who is Bressant’s judge? The only clue the movie drops our way is in the way Harris plays Bressant. There is something suspicious about the man from the start, as if he were harboring a deep anger toward a past experience, so much so that his vigilantism seems rooted in something deeper than justice (at least as he defines it) at any cost. It’s a shadow that hangs over Bressant until his final scene, so that his dying words “I love children,” only seem to account for a part of his motivation. More likely, his actions, as they become revealed, are a form of compensation for a past dark moment.

            Patrick has his own rule of thumb. “Shame is God’s way of telling you what you did was wrong,” he says. For everyone else, the answers aren’t so easily identified. The struggle between what’s right and what ‘s right and what’s just continue tugging at each other, becoming increasingly tense, until culminating in the final twist when Amanda is found alive and well living with Police Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman). It’s a twist not only in the common sense (one of the supposed good guys turns out to be a mole), but also a turn in the film’s direction. Up to then, Captain Doyle was the single beacon of morality in the film. Having lost a daughter himself to a killer, he made it his personal crusade to rescue lost children before it’s too late. He operates by the book and enforces protocol. But to what extent does he take his cause to rescue children? As far as kidnapping Amanda and taking her to his cabin by the lake.

            Affleck films Doyle’s cabin and its surroundings in idyllic natural beauty, tranquility, and bright natural colors; a stark contrast to the urban jungle seen through most of the film. It’s a great place to raise a child, away from noise, pollution, and crime. But is it legal? Well, no, but to understand why that would matter to Patrick is to understand his respect for his community. As unfit a mother as Helene is, Amanda is her kid and, as Helene’s neighbor, Patrick owes her the safe return of Amanda. But would Patrick have been wrong to let Amanda stay with the Doyles in a place where she was loved and cared for? It’s a complicated enough question and Affleck makes it harder by making a responsible and level-headed persona like Angie support that option. Patrick decides to go the other route and calls the cops on Doyle, cutting his relationship with Angie as a result. His choice was the legally correct one, but that’s hard to remember as we see Doyle’s wife in tears as the police pull Amanda from her arms; she is losing her second daughter.

            But Gone Baby Gone paints a world in which right and wrong have no visible boundaries. Some people do the wrong thing for right reasons, and others do wrong by trying to do right. There isn’t a way to satisfy everyone. Not surprisingly, those caught up in this endless shade of gray are law enforcement officials honoring their commitment to the community but also bound by the regulations of law. Take, for instance, Patrick’s impulse killing of a child molester when he finds a dead seven-year-old boy in his bathtub. He is haunted by his action almost immediately after. There is really no reason he should be except for the fact that it wasn’t the legal thing to do. His decision to call the police on Doyle was his way of making amends, by doing what was the legal thing to do. But, once more, did he do the wrong thing ethically to compensate for having done the right illegal thing?

            Given the difficulty in deciding what’s right, the easiest characters to trust are those operating outside of the law for their own purposes if only because there is never a question about where to stand with them. Cheese (Edi Gathegi) is a drug-dealing thug, simple as that, and the bar punks are little more than the neighborhood muscle. Maybe because their intentions and motivations are so obvious, they are easily manipulated and used by the alleged forces of good to accomplish their own ends. Cheese, for one, is essentially sacrificed after his use as a stooge runs its course.

            Gone Baby Gone is one of the best written thrillers of recent years, unfolding like a first-rate detective story with many unforgettable moments that verge between the comical and bizarrely creepy, something that may become Affleck’s signature after the ghastly nun-robbery in The Town. But the suspense and horror comes packaged with loaded questions, creating one of the decade’s most thought-provoking films. In a blink it turned reinvented Affleck’s career, pointing it in the right direction and was the second brought Casey Affleck, one of our finest actors, into the mainstream. Surprisingly, and this is something that even Affleck found astounding, the entire cast is in tune with the unseen side of Boston that only true Bostonians like the Affleck brothers know so well, except for Morgan Freeman who was likely cast simply because he is a great actor to cast in any role. But his detachment from his surroundings makes sense once we learn Doyle’s secret. To do what he did, Doyle had to think of Dorchester and the neighboring boroughs as a hopeless wasteland where no child can stand a chance for a good life. The question of Gone Baby Gone is not who Doyle is to make such a judgment but, rather, is he right in doing what he does about it.