Perhaps it's time of year. As I write, the internet is awash with speculation as to the winners of the 85th Academy Awards. The excellent Argo has already been pegged by statistician and occasional internet statistician soothsayer Nate Silver as a dead cert for Best Picture, and I'm inclined to agree with him, but not just because it's a good movie. Never mind that it's a tightly-paced thriller with a healthy side order of comic relief. Or that the subject matter is both fascinating and sensitively handled. No: unique among this year's nominees, Argo is a big high five to Hollywood's vision of itself as a force for good.
Covering the now-declassified exfiltration of six American escapees during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, Argo follows Ben Affleck as CIA hollow-man Tony Mendez. Tasked with rescuing the embassy staff from hostile territory, Mendez's leftfield idea is to masquerade as a Canadian movie producer who is considering Iran as the location for a low budget sci-fi flick. Once he arrives in the country, his refugees take on the roles of members of his team. The Hollywood wannabes then spend a day going through the motions of considering Tehran as a suitable venue for a Star Wars rip-off, before heading to the airport safe in the knowledge that the Iranian authorities don't think they're escaped hostages. Sounds simple enough, but sprinkle in a few tense set-pieces along the way and the result is a well-paced, well-shot thriller.
Argo elevates itself far beyond suspense-by-numbers in large part thanks to its portrayal of the excesses (and shortcomings) of Hollywood in 1979. Affleck's CIA man is a straight-laced fish out of water in this world full of irrational actors, huge personalities and amoral agents. Alan Arkin and John Goodman as bona fide movie producers act as Affleck's guides in the early part of the film; later they amplify the surreal nature of Hollywood as the action cuts between the increasingly tense rescue in Iran and the banal humour of daily life for a special effects supervisor. A particularly absurd scene has the two risking to annoy another producer in order to answer the phone: a sharp contrast to the life-or-death situations faced by Mendez and the hostages.
Herein lies the reason why Argo is a shoo-in for Best Picture: it's a movie that paints Hollywood in the best possible light, as an industry that can save American lives by being its own crazy self. Argo will win the Best Picture in part because it's a big pat on the back for Hollywood as a whole: the bad guys get beaten because the movie folk used the power of cinema to save the day.
