GONE GIRL

Gone Girl is an unusually wrenching film, even for David Fincher, and a hard specimen to classify. What starts out as a psychological thriller (did an unhappy husband kill his wife and then report her missing to throw the police off track?) turns into a mind game, shifting gears about half-way through. Had this been simply a case study of a doomed marriage spiraling into darkness the game change would have been a weakness and a stronger case could be made for the big revelation to be interpreted as a vilification of women. However, when it turns the table, Gone Girl creates a new villain; the media. Both the media and the public that feeds it take over the role of monsters so thoroughly in the movie that the direction of the tragedy between Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), if there even was one, is beside the point.

This, it should be said, it truer of the film than the book. In the book, Gillian Flynn devotes at least as much time to the mechanisms of Nick and Amy’s relationship and to what extent love existed between them. In their dynamics, love, at least in the common sense, is not only unnecessary but may also be misguided. It’s a marriage built on conditions between two people who have reason to fear each other and, as Amy argues in the novel, it works all the more secure for it. When she wrote the screenplay, Flynn pushed Amy’s relationship ideology to the peripheral side and centered the script to the ills of the media. For the purposes of the film this was a smart choice, making for a concise, focused, and terse adaptation.

In the movie, almost every move the Dunnes make is motivated by a foreknowledge of the media and concern for public perception. That leads to the ultimate horror of the story. What they actually do to each other is, to use one of Amy’s choice terms, background noise. They act first and foremost as fodder for TV.

“In today’s media landscape every human emotion is packaged for someone else to consume, whether it’s social media or a true-crime TV show,” Flynn said. “People in the public eye are all taking turns packaging themselves for consumption by others or being packaged by others. We can’t control how we’re being viewed or how people perceive us.Fact is, in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, we’re consuming other people’s tragedies as entertainment.”

At first there is nothing inherently strange about Nick and Amy. They meet like a lot of couples, among hip circles at a New York bar, marry, and then move to a small Missouri town to care for Nick’s mother in her final years. This is when and where the tension seems to begin. There were earlier signs of disaccord, but the nearby presence of Nick’s family seems to distance Amy. Things get worse when Nick’s habit of spending continues after his lay-off and Amy allows her parents to take from her trust fund. These quarrels are common to many married couples but Nick’s image seems to get uglier fast upon their move to the suburbs and he shuts his wife off emotionally, even turning violent when she pleads to have a baby.   

But Fincher is pulling the carpet out beneath us and in time will incriminate us with the same locals who bought Amy’s story uncritically. Everything we know of their marriage comes from Amy’s diary, told in flashback. We accept what she tells us without ever questioning her reliability as a narrator. There is, Fincher says, no excuse for us buying Amy’s story as easily as the locals who assume Nick murdered his wife. If the media and the movies themselves haven’t given us enough precedent as to the dangers of fast assumptions, Gone Girl gives us plenty.

The first thing to strike us about the flashbacks is the dreamy quality; the heightened music, dark tones, and fake sounding dialogue. Amy (in both voice-over and in person) sounds especially phony, meaning her words have been rehearsed and faked. It is, after all, based on how she recorded her own words in her journal, where she polished her image into the character she wanted the public to see.

Both in and out of the flashbacks those around her speak more naturally, but the scenes set in the present, when Amy is “gone”, seem far closer to the real world. Of course, flashbacks often have dreamy feels as memory is, indeed, a foggy thing but, in Gone Girl, they are deliberately staged that way by their narrator and so the haziness of recollection has little to do with the matter.

Only in the intervals between the flashbacks does a different picture of Nick and Amy begin to form. Amy had at least two previous turbulent relationships with men and one ended in a near suicide for her lover. Suggesting there are at least other sides to her story.

Nick, likewise, doesn’t seem to be quite the monster Amy paints him as. He acts genuinely concerned about his wife and, if anything, he seems a bit of a sap. Still, we follow what Amy’s diary tells us until the movie reveals the truth about both Amy and her diary, when we tend to feel more relieved than unsurprised.

Fincher and Flynn thrust it on us as “see, don’t jump to conclusion” twist. Had Nick been executed for Amy’s murder (unlikely, anyhow, as the officer investigating the case reminds us how difficult it is to get a conviction without a body) we are just as guilty as the locals suckered in by Amy and her use of the media.

Of course, David Fincher is not one to offer easy answers. If movies and the media itself are reason to take Amy’s account with a grain of salt, Fincher also points to a number of reason in favor of her credibility. The strongest case for Amy’s story is that her account of her relationship with Desi, the suicidal millionaire played by Neil Patrick Harris, is proven at least partially true when she reconnects with him after her plan is thwarted. Everything we learn about Desi is consistent with Amy’s description; mostly

his emotional imbalance and need to control.  But this disturbing vibe comes not from Harris’s performance in the movie itself but, of all places, evocations of his performance in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, where he spoofed his own public image while also using women’s vulnerability, feigning empathy with them, to gain control of their actions. If Harold & Kumar presented the darkest depths of his persona, Gone Girl uses it as a very bleak glimpse into Amy’s past and a possible motive for his distrust of men.

            A lot of what Amy says about Nick could also well be true. He is bound to fits of rage (he smashes a glass when a police interrogation cuts too deep) and has not been entirely honest with his own family about his infidelity. The truth, finally, is somewhere in the middle. That is Fincher’s ultimate stance. We shouldn’t dismiss Amy’s story entirely. Even after the half-way point when its climax is revealed to have been staged.

            If we ever lost sympathy for Nick, after the big reveal we want Amy to fail. She almost does when she underestimates a couple she takes into her confidence, but whenever her plan begins to crumble she is always one step ahead because she knows the media so well. When her original plan fails, she moves to plan B which, because the viewing public likes happy endings, succeeds (is there a suggestion that television audiences dictate news story outcomes?) Amy’s triumph, however, is not just a result of her own savviness but also of Nick’s and that is the final sad irony. Through the whole ordeal, Nick has learned enough about the media and what its audience wants to know his options are predetermined. He knows who his wife is, what she’s doing, and how the public will react, and so he knows his chance for getting out is becoming smaller, given the influence of the media in making or breaking a person, especially when a baby is involved. Gone Girl is a tragedy about a man who gets to know the media so well only to get trapped by it into a life of misery. He is, finally, as much a sell-out to it as the people who condemned him.

            Stylistically and emotively, Gone Girl is another triumph for David Fincher who can’t seem to make a wrong turn. Yes, the film runs a bit too long but it knows how to sprawl itself. The flashbacks, which start coming before we even know what kind of film this is ultimately going to be, offer him the greatest canvas for what he does best; creating suspense within ordinary settings and drab infrastructure. He likely saw a great opportunity in Flynn’s third novel and joined the wagon after 20^th-Century-Fox purchased the rights to the novel in the summer of 2012 for $1.5 million, with $500,00 going to Flynn for writing the screenplay. Fincher has still not signed on, however, by the time Fincher submitted the first draft in December. The hard part for Flynn was largely done, though she thought it a positive experience.

            “It was thrilling to see it all come together,” she said. “As someone who has covered movies for many years, I know that most of the time it doesn’t turn out so well for the original author. What was different this time around was that I had a great director who really liked the book and didn’t want to turn it into something other than what it already was.”

            From the start, Fincher and Flynn worked well together and the finished product has the polished feel of a great minds working in perfect harmony.

            “David Fincher liked the same things in the book that I liked. He wanted a faithful screen adaptation, not a whole new thing,” Flynn added.

            When the book started making waves in Hollywood (before even hitting shelves), Fincher was thought of as the best, if only, director capable of bringing the psychological depths of the work to the surface. Even Flynn came to realize that her novel would not easily lend itself to film.

            “Of course once I got into it I realized I was dealing with some complicated ideas,” she said. “It’s an internal story, centering on the characters’ thoughts. There’s lots of jumping back and forth in time. The diary stuff. And the plotting is very dense. So I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew I would have to concentrate on pacing and rearranging the order of some scenes. And with this story, tone is hugely important. It’s a thriller but with some dark humor — deep and dark.”

            As well as Flynn and Fincher worked together, it is unlikely that either one imagined how much the cast would bring to understanding of the book, even from critically shunned names like Tyler Perry as an attorney with an ability to play the media at its own game and come out ahead.

            “I’ve said all along that Amy is the showy role, but that the actor playing Nick has to be simply great,” Flynn said. “If he doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work. And the great thing about Ben’s performance is that he makes you care even when you’re thinking he might be a murderer. You want to hang out with him and tell him it’s going to be OK … but you also want to punch him in the mouth. And Rosamund really blooms in her role. She gets to show so many emotions and sides to a human being. She was constantly asking me about Amy’s background, her friends, what kind of party she would enjoy. She had a copy of the book filled with notes.”

            Appropriately so for such a unique film, Gone Girl is one of the very few times in Hollywood (especially when the author of the original work was directly involved) that many cooks from many different circles created something wonderful, in this case the most atmospheric and provocative film of 2014. The media is a frequent and easy target for its own spawn, the film industry, but few movies have had the nerve to make their audience complicit in its corruption. Gone Girl’s makes its most powerful statement by making us gawkers into a personal tragedy before we even understand it, much like the locals in the film we think we are above.

THE BOXTROLLS

The Boxtrolls is a movie of such strong virtues that it’s tempting to overlook its shortcomings. Unfortunately, they are there, spoiling the wonder of classic dark fantasy (Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters! to be exact).

To be optimistic, there is more to admire than regret here. As always, LAIKA’s puppets become as real and move as fluidly as any cartoon, there is even a nifty philosophical gag about the craft for those who sit to the end of the credits (which are fun hand-drawn gags in themselves). Each character is a lively creation. Like Walt Disney first did for his seven dwarfs for Snow White, each of the playful trolls is a distinct invention, named after the type of box it uses for its shell. There’s Wheels, Oil Can, Shoe, and Fish (Dee Bradley Baker), who is a sort of father figure. To who?  Why to the human baby they took from the human world above and raised as their own in their secret cavern under the streets of the town.

They took in this “Trubshaw Baby” (as he became known after his kidnapping) as one of their one and named him after the egg carton he wears over his shirt for reasons the movie explains in due time, but it’s clear from the start that the world above is a nasty place to be. The elite ruler, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) reigns from a castle high above a mountain-tip overlooking the village. Both the ladder to and the aspiration of royalty in Cheesebridge is to be a good judge of cheese, a title distinguished by a coveted white top hat.

This is an even stronger throwback to Great Britain’s class system than 2005’s Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The baddies, a gang of boxtroll exterminators, are marked by their tattered red hats. They are a dirty mean bunch that aspires to bigger things. Though the movie makes the point that, “Cheese, boxes, hats, are not what make you. You make you,” the rest of Cheesebridge seems to scorn both the trolls and the exterminators, and that’s the irony. Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) and his men live in a stark factory much like the cavern of the creatures they chase.

Oh, but The Boxtrolls takes plenty of jabs at the upper-class as well. As Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) makes his way to the grand ball to warn the town of Snatcher’s evil plan, the movie takes every opportunity to treat the pompous society with ridicule and by the time he is humiliated and cast away from the castle Eggs vows never to be seen amongst the “real monsters” again. Indeed, Lord Portley-Rind cares more about his hat and cheeses than Winnie (Elle Fanning), his rebellious daughter, in contrast to the strong sense of family among the troll community and their adopted son.

There is a sort of rusty old charm to stop-motion animation that CGI, for all of its razzle-dazzle, can’t capture. Each character seems to exist of real matter and occupy real space as, indeed, a puppet does. No matter how grotesque (a troll, a grimy exterminator, etc.), each being or object here is crafted with such delicate care, they appeal to multiple senses. We can feel and therefore crave the cheese the judges hold, we can feel the sensory appeal of the prestigious hats when they are described as “white and fluffy” and feel the desire to hold one. Even the bugs that are fodder for the trolls look good enough to grab.

After animators in the United States abandoned it for other techniques, Great Britain took to stop-motion animation and did wonderful things with it, especially Cosgrove Hall’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. The charm never wore off in England and found a new cast in Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. Though an American production, The Boxtrolls is a healthy reminder of the primal beauty offered in The Wind in the Willows (Snatcher’s most wicked henchman, Mr. Gristle, even bares and unflattering resemblance to Mr. Toad while Mr. Pickles, his most eager to redeem, could not look more like Rat when sporting his fake whiskers).

The Boxtrolls brings back the old pleasantry of a vanishing art form and is the perfect way to bring a storybook to life. But the whimsy is cut short by hurried writing, which turns out to be a costlier mistake here than usual.

The first mistake of directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable was opening the film with the trolls’ presence already established in Cheesebridge, where they have become as a sight as pigeons and rats. It would have been nice to have witnessed the surprise and panic stirred by their arrival. What did the villagers think when these little green men started popping out from under the streets? Was there fear or amazement? How did the hostility first start? The film foregoes all of that and begins at a point when all the shock and awe has passed and the trolls may as well be everyday vermin. They are no longer so much feared, but loathed. Besides the mystery of what happened to the Trubshaw Baby, there is no longer any mystery about them and this over familiarity with the supernatural may be what disappointed Alonso Duralde who called it, “A charmless misfire.”

Duralde is not being quite fair. The Boxtrolls has a thumping heart and designer’s elegance, but for all its artistic flair and creative inventions, described accurately by LAIKA president Travis Knight as, “a visually dazzling mash-up of gripping detective story, absurdist comedy, and steampunk adventure with a surprisingly wholesome heart. It’s Dickens by way of Monty Python,” The Boxtrolls is surprisingly blasé about its own magic and fantasy. It’s surprising considering LAIKA’s fascination with secret worlds. Coraline, the studio’s best film, introduced a parallel world just a wall away from a mundane existence, with obvious signs that something terrible was hidden behind its pleasures. ParaNorman was considerably less meticulous in developing its chills, in part because the little boy of the title had the gift of seeing ghosts before the movie began, but it still managed to introduce the spirits in such a level that shocked us along with the child accustomed to seeing them. In The Boxtrolls, the little creatures are treated as just another part of the city. Wondrous as they may be in themselves, we need to see them strike awe in our fellow humans to be convinced of their power.

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.