ARGO: This is the Best Bad Idea We’ve Got

Argo (2012) – Directed by Ben Affleck – Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Clea DuVall, Kyle Chandler, Tate Donovan, Michael Parks, Richard Kind, Titus Welliver, Rory Cochrane, Bob Gunton, Zeljko Ivanek, Philip Baker Hall, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Why is it ARGO gets Oscar talk yet The Avengers doesn’t?

I’m being purposely obtuse, of course. I know darn well why Avengers doesn’t get any Oscar talk, but I raise the issue to once again bash on awards shows. The Oscars is supposed to represent the best in cinema, is it not? Both ARGO and Avengers are incredibly well made movies with incredibly smart scripts, fantastic directing, great acting … yet ARGO will get Oscar buzz and Avengers will have to settle for being the third highest grossing movie of all time. It reasons like this why I don’t bother with the Oscars, as they are more politically and PR-driven than an actual award of filmmaking merit.

All of that is prelude to my reaction to ARGO, a darn good movie from the engaging directing hands of Ben Affleck. I was prepared for ARGO to be a solid drama, but I was not prepared for it to be funny.

ARGO is a very funny movie, however, chiefly through the first half of the movie before settling in for a tense, suspense-filled second half. It’s a smart decision, as it’s the first half of the movie where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. Set during the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, ARGO tells the based-on-true-life tale of how CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) extracted six American diplomats from the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. Mendez’s plan to get them out is to create cover identities for the diplomats as a film crew for an in-production science fiction film.

There are a myriads of problems with this plan, not the least of which is that it depends on putting a fake science fiction film into production in order to fool the Iranian security forces who are scouring Iran to take any stray Americans hostage. The film gets its biggest laughs from the discomfort this plan raises in the Washington bureaucrats and the open-minded embrace from Mendez’s two Hollywood partners, make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Goodman and Arkin are fantastic together, with Chambers’ enthusiasm balanced perfectly by Siegel’s calmer demeanor.

The Washington/Hollywood split shows an interesting approach to casting in ARGO. The Washington scenes are quick-hitting, with plenty of known actors playing bureaucrats. Kyle Chandler, Titus Welliver, Bob Gunton, and Philip Baker Hall appear in a scene or two or three to question Mendez’s plan. None of these actors are playing characters as much as they are united in a kind of Gestalt of Dissent. Their job is to act incredulous, doubt Mendez’s plan, and make the CIA look smarter. In Hollywood, Chambers and Siegel become actual characters, allowing Goodman and Arkin to develop a wonderful chemistry in their shared effort to assist Mendez.

Affleck does a wonderful job contrasting the deadly seriousness of the hostages with the absurdity of creating the fake movie. While I’m sure it would have looked incredibly bad if the news got out that the CIA was in Hollywood getting Adrienne Barbeau to sign on for a movie they didn’t intend to make, it’s great fun for us and a smart creative decision to balance off the heaviness of the situation in Iran. Or worse, that they were putting on an elaborate reading of the movie for the press, with actors in full costume, just to try and get a notice in Variety in order to fool the Iranians. It’s a bit of weird world that we live in, of course, that sees us paying money to eat popcorn to see a story that exists because hostages were taken, but this is part of the way we cope with the hardships endured by previous generations.

Chambers and Siegel display a very cinematic attitude towards the plan, which is to say, that despite the gravity of the situation half a world away, they seem to enjoy playing junior spies. Chambers has a quip for every situation, and Siegel has a laid back, dry sense of humor. Both of these approaches allow Affleck to play Mendez as a rather boring dude. He’s serious about his work (which he needs to be), and Affleck sees no reason to give Mendez a bunch of over-inflated histrionics to make himself stand out. It’s a very understated performance, which allows his few fireworks moments to have a greater impact.

As I mentioned, it’s this first half of the film where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. The back half is solidly put together and delivers a fair amount of tension, but it’s nothing that you can’t find in a whole host of other movies. Once Mendez hits Iran, ARGO is simply an extraction movie. To go back to the Avengers comparison, that script is much more complicated than this script, yet both of them do exactly what their respective movies need. The back-half of ARGO doesn’t need to be complicated because we’re already invested in the story. Really, the big star of the back half of the film isn’t Mendez or the hostages, but Bryan Cranston’s Jack O’Donnell.

O’Donnell is Mendez’s supervisor and at the start of the film he brings Mendez into a meeting wit the State Department, but encourages him to not get involved. State wants to run this situation, and O’Donnell is happy to let them do it. Mendez can’t help picking apart all of the various ideas that State has come up with to get a hostage out, as they’re the kind of ideas that sound good from a distance but would fall apart up close. (Like wanting to give the six hostages bikes so they could peddle for a border that is, as Mendez reminds them, several hundred miles away.) When Mendez comes up with his plan, State is hesitant to even listen, let alone sign on, but Mendez and O’Donnell’s sales pitch leads to two of the film’s best lines.

Both are from O’Donnell. On the way in to see Vice President Mondale (Hall) and another diplomat (really, the names of the diplomats and politicians are completely unimportant; as I said earlier, they work together to provide the Gestalt of Dissent), O’Donnell tells Mendez that talking to these two is going to be like “the Muppets talking to Statler and Waldorf.” Once inside the meeting, Mondale is skeptical and openly wonders if they don’t have better ideas, to which O’Donnell replies, “This is the best bad idea we’ve got.”

It’s O’Donnell that has the best dramatic scenes in the back half, too. After telling Mendez that the White House has called off the plan, Mendez stews on it (he takes a bottle of alcohol from the Canadian embassy but barely touches it), and then decides he’s going ahead with the plan anyways, White House be damned. This causes all sorts of problems for O’Donnell because Mendez’s plan needs his help. Specifically, O’Donnell needs to get the seven plane tickets out of Tehran confirmed before Mendez gets to the airport, or they’ll be all dressed up with nowhere to go. Cranston is fantastic running around Washington getting these tickets verified (he needs Presidential approval) and there’s a good bit of tension in Tehran with Mendez and the hostages getting through security. There are a couple beats that come off as trumped up, such as the tickets not being approved when Mendez checks in, but then appearing 30 seconds later, or Siegel and Chambers getting back to their office just as the Iranian security guard was pulling the phone away from his ear, but they don’t hurt the film in a significant away.

Indeed, even though I knew everyone was getting out, Affleck and his team do an amazing job creating as much tension as they do about what is essentially seven people getting on a plane. Affleck uses a lot of close-ups and a lot of contrasting frantic Iranians with nervous Americans, but it works really well.

Since I don’t watch awards shows, I don’t have any way of handicapping ARGO’s chances for getting nominations, but this is a very good movie. It is a quiet movie, though, that seems destined to be lost between the summer’s noise and the winter’s emotion. The only kick I get out of awards is that I realize that if people I like getting nominated or even win, that means there’s a greater chance I get to see more of them. There’s been a critical response around ARGO that Ben Affleck has arrived as a director. We see that Warner Brothers has taken notice, as Affleck was rumored to be in consideration for the Justice League movie. Both of these are good things for me because I like Affleck as a director. I see ARGO much less as a sign that he’s arrived, and rather as a sign that he’s established himself as a director who makes movies I want to see, as much for the stories he chooses to film as the way in which he assembles them.

Whatever film he directs next will be a film I’m already lined up to see.

SINGLES: I Was Just Nowhere Near Your Neighborhood

Singles (1992) – Directed by Cameron Crowe – Starring Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda, Kyra Sedgwick, Campbell Scott, Sheila Kelley, Jim True-Frost, Bill Pullman, James LeGros, Ally Walker, Tom Skerritt, Peter Horton, Jeremy Piven, Eric Stoltz, Victor Garber, Paul Giamatti, and Tim Burton.

I kinda love that the message of SINGLES is not just that to find romantic happiness you have to stop being full of sh*t, but that you have to find a partner who’s also willing to stop being full of sh*t.

I was a sophomore at Syracuse when SINGLES was released in the fall of 1992, but as much as I loved Cameron Crowe’s SAY ANYTHING it was the music that initially attracted me to this movie of folks that were dealing with issues that would be coming my way in a few years. Before arriving at SU in August ’91, I was a huge fan of Mother Love Bone’s Apple album, and crushed (as much as high schoolers can be crushed about the death of a musician who had passed before the band’s one album was even released) that the band I had just discovered was already finished. I knew some of the members of Love Bone were forming a new group, but I didn’t know what that group was called. (Remember, kids, this in the pre-internet days.)

I hit the campus record store in the Schine Student Center constantly. We had already heard rumblings (which meant from Rolling Stone or Spin, really) about this new group, Nirvana, that was releasing an album that was going to blow everyone away, but I was more interested in following along with the guys from Mother Love Bone.

I just wish I knew what their new name was.

Flipping through both the CDs and cassettes and looking closely at any group I had never heard of, I found a group called Temple of the Dog. Recognizing that assemblage of words as a lyric from a Love Bone song, I bought the cassette and discovered it was a tribute album, and not the new group. A few days later, I found a cassette from a group called Pearl Jam, which had a sticker on it announcing, “Featuring former members of Mother Love Bone.”

Bought it. Listened to it. Hated it.

So I listened to it, again. Gah. I paid for this?

I distinctly remember I was writing a letter (a letter!) to my pal Chad back home on yellow legal paper, and the need for a soundtrack to my background scribbling is maybe the only reason I listened to it a third time. And this time … this time when the opening guitar chords of “Alive” cranked out of my crummy boom box, it was like looking into the sky, seeing the clouds part, and the hand of Zeus hurl a thunderbolt at you. That riff was transcendent, and opened up the entire album. I listened to Ten over and over and over again. I listened to Ten, Temple of the Dog, and Nevermind so much that year, that my only brush with popularity on the first floor of Marion Hall that year was when people started recognizing me as the guy who was listening to the cool music before it became cool music.

A year later, SINGLES was released and it was the music, not the romance, that drove me to see it.

By the fall of 1992, though, our world had dramatically shifted. It was a weird feeling for those of us that hadn’t been huge fans of the popular music of the day to now find “our” music taking over. When I walked down any of the various Frat/Sorority Rows and heard “my” music pumping out of the buildings that blissfully pumped out whatever music was cool that week, I didn’t know whether to feel happy, sad, or bemused.

A year earlier, when I was the only person at Syracuse I knew that had the album, I’d gone to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert at the Landmark Theater in downtown Syracuse, where Pearl Jam was the opening act for the opening act (Smashing Pumpkins). Hardly anyone was in their seats when Pearl Jam took the stage, but me and Nate (who’d bussed over from Utica) had made damn sure we were there because we’d come to see Pearl Jam. As their 30-minute set unfolded, you could see people getting excited about this group most of them had never heard of before that night. (Pearl Jam’s name isn’t even on the ticket.) It was one of the few times I can ever remember being in a place where buzz was being born.

When SINGLES was released, however, words like “grunge” and “flannel” were becoming part of the cool crowd’s vernacular, and those of us who were there before the buzz were confronted with a new question of what to do: stay true to the music we had been championing, or admit that, on some level, our dislike for the popular music of our high school days was linked with our being not part of the cool crowd.

Without being overtly about this particular question of self-identity, SINGLES is full of people navigating their private vs. public selves, with the public self always some altered version of the private, true self. Crowe revolves these questions of self identity around relationships, specifically the relationship between young professionals Steve and Linda (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick) and struggling dreamers Janet and Cliff (Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon). There are friends of these four characters to help round out the various approaches to love, but these are the relationships at the center of the film.

Crowe sends these two relationships on opposing arcs. As the film opens, Janet and Cliff are ostensibly seeing each other, though Janet believes them to be in a committed relationship, and Cliff believes Janet to be one of the multiple women he sees. Janet is in love with Cliff and Cliff is in love with his dream of being a rock star, casting their relationship as one part tragedy and one part comedy. Full of bubbly positivity, Janet is that achingly cute friend we all had in college going out with the total doucebag. If SINGLES were remade today, she would undoubtedly be recast as a hipster, so let’s all take a moment to thank our deity of choice (as an agnostic, I will thank the sun, Cherry Coke Zero, and Kate Beckinsale in a catsuit) that SINGLES was made pre-hipster.

There’s a tragic aspect to Janet, too, of course. Stuck in that liminal state between girlish fantasy and grown-up realism, Janet has to realize that Cliff sees other women, but refuses to acknowledge it during the first half of the movie. Confronted by Cliff’s statement about seeing other women, she just smiles warmly and awkwardly, and keeps pushing forward with her fantasy that they’re a couple. When Janet has a rare moment of confrontation with Cliff, it leads to one of the more honest and perfect moments in the film.

“Are my breasts too small?” she asks Cliff.

“Sometimes,” he admits.

This admission spurs Janet to seek breast enlargement surgery, where she meets plastic surgeon Jeffrey Jamison (Bill Pullman). On the day of her surgery, Dr. Jamison breaks down and admits that he doesn’t want to perform the surgery because Janet is perfect just as she is. As the stand-in for nice guys, Jamison is awkward around women despite operating on them every day. “I’m thirty-three years old,” he laments, “and I don’t know how to have fun.” If SINGLES were a two hour movie instead of 90 minutes, Jamison and Janet would probably go on a date before things inevitably work out with Cliff, but Crowe thankfully saves us this subplot. Instead, Janet eschews the surgery and breaks up with Cliff, gaining a bit of independence, and taking a step towards adulthood and away from her fantasies.

The other relationship involves Steve and Linda. Steve is looking for a new relationship, but Linda is hesitant, having just been worked over by a guy pretending to a university student whose visa is about to run out. They spend a week or so together before consummating their relationship the night before he has to return home to Spain, but then on her next night out, Linda sees him hitting on someone else. She’s crushed and in no mood to jump into a new relationship, but after rejecting Steve’s advances, they run into each other at a newsstand and away they go, struggling with the idea of being in a relationship with one another. When Steve and Linda are simply together, they’re fine, but when they start thinking about themselves not only as a couple, but as the (hopefully) eternal couple, they over-think their situation.

SINGLES does a really nice job of keeping everything moving and the film works as an American antecedent to the Richard Curtis-styled British romantic comedies. Crowe does a good job keeping things light, and the storytelling technique of having characters speak to the camera on occasion works really nicely. Steve talks to the camera near the beginning of the film, Janet gets her turn a bit later, and then Cliff becomes the mature voice of reason late in the film. All of them are smarter than their in-world cinematic versions, which suggests the entire artifice of the faces we put on to impress other people.

While neither deep nor moving, SINGLES manages to be a tasty snack of a romantic comedy. There’s a bunch of “Hey, is that ____?!?” cameos from Paul Giamatti, Victor Garber, Eric Stoltz, and Tim Burton that are always nice to see, but the success of the film is really thanks to the four leads and Crowe’s breezy, quotable script. The message of the film makes a good answer to all that angst me and my fellow Gen-Xers were feeling back in the early ’90s – just stop being so full of sh*t and go after the things that you want, not the things you think you’re supposed to want.

TITANIC: A Woman’s Heart is a Deep Ocean of Secrets

Titanic (1997) – Directed by James Cameron – Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Frances Fisher, David Warner, Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Michael Ensign, Eric Braeden, Ewan Stewart, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Suzy Amis, Danny Nucci, and Ioan Gruffudd.

TITANIC is why Hollywood exists.

Epic, breathtaking, overblown, and yet achingly small when it needs to be, TITANIC is both an emotional and technical masterpiece. James Cameron’s film is the grandest of cinematic spectacles, artfully blending romance and tragedy in such a way that makes the smallest and largest moments resonate with a deep emotional power. TITANIC is not a complex story, yet the simplicity of the trapped rich girl and hopeful poor boy falling in love aboard the world’s most famous ship makes their love story even grander as it is set in the context of the legendary disaster that awaits the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.

I fully and readily admit that I am utterly in the bag for this movie. Even when it was released back in 1997 and I was in full-blown elitist snark, “everything sucks” mode I was moved by this very simple, yet sweeping love story set aboard a massive spectacle. For me, James Cameron has only made two masterpieces, and this is one of them. (Aliens is the other.) Perhaps because these characters are so simple and set against such an important historical moment, they gain a timeless quality that sustains this movie.

Cameron’s style of directing TITANIC is to continually contrast the smallness of people with the grandness of the ship, or the importance of a small moment in the context of the ship’s sinking, and in doing so he elevates the cinematic impact of both. For the people aboard the vessel, every emotion they have takes on greater importance, while the ship itself is constantly represented as a massive leviathan, complete with towering stacks and endless labyrinthine corridors.

What works most for me about TITANIC is that Cameron is constantly offering us these intimate moments between characters, and that continually drives home the idea to embrace every moment of your life because (clumsy Cameron metaphor coming in 3 … 2 …) you never know when you’re going to run into an iceberg and run out of the possibility of moments.

There’s all sorts of intimate moments here, however, that touch me emotionally. It’s not always the romantic moments between Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), either. There’s a whole passenger list full of moments:

It’s Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), the Titanic‘s shipbuilder, standing alone in front of a clock in the first class smoking room as his ship – his ship – is falling apart and sinking. His lament to Rose that, “I’m sorry I couldn’t build you a better ship,” reveals that he’s putting the weight of this entire disaster on his own shoulders.

It’s Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), so full of vinegar throughout the film, being deflated by the unwillingness of anyone else in her lifeboat to go back and look for survivors.

It’s the old couple holding each other in bed as water is swamping the ship.

And the moment that, for some reason, hits me hardest: at the end of the film, when Rose is standing alone on the deck of the Carpathia and Cameron gives us a perspective shot looking up at the towering Statue of Liberty. Why this moment resonates stronger than the other moments in the film is nothing I’ve ever really been able to explain. I think it has something to do with the promise embodied in that Statue of America being the land of new beginnings. From Rose’s perspective, this is a return to the United States for Rose, but it’s not with the sense of entrapment she felt at the start of the voyage. Where she was saddened and crushed by being able to see her whole life as Cal’s wife laid out before her, she now has complete freedom to live whatever life she chooses to live. Lady Liberty is once again a beacon of possibility instead of oppression. There’s a stoic strength to the Statue, too, and Cameron uses the brief appearance to symbolize hope, strength, new beginnings, and safety.

Is TITANIC a manipulative story?

Damn straight it is, but isn’t that why we go to the movies … to be manipulated? Don’t hate because Cameron writes that manipulation large. The same goes for the film’s adherence to history – I don’t need my movies to be 100% historically accurate (though it’s nice if they are), so Cameron’s altered depiction of Molly Brown is unfortunate, but not a deal breaker. What I want is for movies to be 100% engaging, and TITANIC is definitely that.

Cameron contrasts the tragedy of the ship’s narrative with the uplift of the love story. We know the ship is going to eventually sink and we know Jack and Rose are going to fall in love, and the two arcs intersect each other at the moment the Titanic hits the iceberg and ruptures its hull. Both DiCaprio and Winslet are fantastic throughout the film. Cameron writes simple characters, of course, but again, I think this ends up being to the film’s advantage, as Cameron encourages you to experience this movie instead of thinking about it. Simple characters work in TITANIC for me because I want to believe in Jack and Rose’s story. I do not want to dwell on the possibility that Jack is some kind of confidence man, and Cameron doesn’t, though he allows the other characters in the film to take advantage of Jack’s lower class to exploit this possibility in the mind of others.

Cameron frames his movie through the lens of Gloria Stuart as Old Rose. Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is a deep sea treasure hunter on the trail of the Heart of the Ocean. He doesn’t find it, but he does uncover a nude drawing of a woman wearing the Heart of the Ocean. Back in the States, Old Rose is living with her granddaughter (Suzy Amis), sees the report, and contacts Brock’s expedition, who fly her out to question her about the diamond’s whereabouts.

While Brock and his crew are unemotional treasure hunters, but they become sucked in to Rose’s story. (Again, Cameron’s penchant for simple characters works to his benefit here, in part because of the story and in part because he’s hired actors like Bill Paxton who can convincingly portray simple characters and still make them seem like real people.) Occasionally, throughout the film, Cameron cuts back to Old Rose telling the story to the crew and I know this is a small, obvious thing to do, but it really works for me to see these cynical guys drawn completely into this old woman’s story.

TITANIC does play a bit loose with Rose’s story. Either what we’re watching is literally her version of events, in which case she’s filling in details that she couldn’t possibly know about (like what was going on in scenes where she wasn’t present), or we’re watching what actually happened, and getting more information than Brock’s expedition.

When the film ends, Brock tells Rose’s granddaughter that he’s spent three years thinking of nothing but Titanic, but he never understood until he heard Old Rose’s story. It’s a powerful moment, delivered in a wonderfully understated manner by Paxton, and speaks to why it’s critically important that personal stories of historical tragedies are told. Life is more than an accumulation of facts and dates and figures and TITANIC brings that home. Yeah, it’s a made-up love story set in the middle of a true tragedy, and yeah, Cameron is more interested in emotional truth than historical truth, but I’m okay with that.

TITANIC is a big, powerful, Hollywood love story, and I love every frame of it. In the final scene, when Old Rose dies or dreams her way back down to the sunken Titanic beneath them to find all of the dead waiting for her, and then applaud her return and reunion with Jack, it stands as a powerful moment of a life well lived, and celebrates that most sacred human connection:

Love.