Argo is a 2012 American historical political espionage drama thriller film directed by, produced by, and starring Ben Affleck. The screenplay, written by Chris Terrio, was adapted from the 1999 memoir The Master of Disguise by U.S. C.I.A. operative Tony Mendez and the 2007 Wired article "The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran" written by Joshuah Bearman. The film deals with the "Canadian Caper", in which Mendez led the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran, Iran, under the guise of filming a science-fiction film during the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis. The film, which also has Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman in supporting roles, was released by Warner Bros. Pictures in the United States on October 12, 2012. It was produced by Affleck, Grant Heslov and George Clooney.
Argo became a box office success, grossing $232 million worldwide, and receiving widespread critical acclaim for the acting, Affleck's direction, Terrio's screenplay, the editing, and Desplat's score. Commentators and participants in the actual operation criticized flaws in historical accuracy. The film received seven nominations at the 85th Academy Awards and won three, for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.
The film also earned five Golden Globe Award nominations; it won Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director, and Alan Arkin was nominated for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. It won Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the 19th Screen Actors Guild Awards and Arkin was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role. It also won: Best Film, Best Editing and Best Director at the 66th British Academy Film Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Screenplay and 37th Hochi Film Award for Best International Picture.
Plot On November 4, 1979, Iranian Islamists storm the United States Embassy in Tehran in retaliation for the right of asylum granted by President Jimmy Carter to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose Western-supported monarchy was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution. Sixty-six embassy staff are taken hostage, but six avoid capture and are secretly sheltered in the home of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor.
The U.S. State Department explores options for exfiltrating them from Iran and consults Tony Mendez, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency exfiltration specialist. He criticizes their proposals but offers no alternative until inspired by watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The cover story he crafts for the escapees requires them to pose as Canadian filmmakers scouting exotic locations for a science-fiction film in Iran.
On the advice of John Chambers, a Hollywood make-up artist who had previously worked for the CIA, Mendez works with film producer Lester Siegel to create a phony film production company. They successfully establish the pretense of developing Argo, a "science fantasy adventure" in the style of Star Wars, to lend the cover story credibility. The revolutionaries reassemble embassy photographs shredded before the takeover and realize some personnel are unaccounted for. Posing as a producer for Argo, Mendez enters Iran under the alias Kevin Harkins and meets with the six escapees, who are growing restless. With the cooperation and under the authority of the Canadian government, Mendez passes along to them Canadian passports and fake identities. The escapees reluctantly go along, knowing that Mendez is also risking his own life. A scouting visit to the bazaar to maintain their cover story takes a bad turn when a hostile shopkeeper harasses them, but their Iranian culture contact hustles them away from the hostile crowd.
Mendez is told the operation has been canceled in favor of a planned military rescue of the hostages. He pushes ahead anyway, forcing his boss, Deputy Director Jack O'Donnell, to hastily re-obtain authorization for the mission and rebook their canceled tickets on a Swissair flight. Tensions rise at the airport, where the escapees' new ticket reservations are belatedly confirmed, and the head guard's call to the fake Hollywood production company is answered only at the last second. The escapees board the plane as airport authorities are alerted to the ruse but fail to stop the plane from taking off.
U.S. involvement in the rescue is suppressed to protect the remaining hostages from retaliation, and full credit is given to the Canadian government. Taylor shuts down the embassy and leaves Iran with his wife while their Iranian housekeeper escapes to Iraq. Mendez is awarded the Intelligence Star, secretly due to the mission's classified nature, and returns to his wife and son in Virginia.
A textual epilogue reveals that the remaining hostages were released after 444 days (1.22 years) in captivity. Chambers, who received the Intelligence Medal of Merit, remained friends with Mendez until his death. Mendez's Intelligence Star was returned to him after Bill Clinton declassified the Canadian Caper in 1997. At the time of the film’s release, Mendez lived with his family in rural Maryland.
Cast
Production
Development Argo is based on the "Canadian Caper" that took place during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980. Chris Terrio wrote the screenplay based on Joshuah Bearman's 2007 article "How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran," which was published in Wired. Affleck mentioned the influences for the film, which include Costa-Gavras's work, All the President's Men, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and The Battle of Algiers which served as references.
In 2007, producers Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Grant Heslov and executive producer David Klawans set up a project based on the article. Affleck's participation was announced in February 2011. The following June, Alan Arkin was the first person cast in the film.
Filming After the rest of the roles were cast, filming began in Los Angeles in August 2011. Additional filming took place in McLean, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Istanbul. The scene in which Mendez drives up to and walks into the CIA headquarters lobby was filmed with permission at the CIA's original headquarters building in Virginia; all other scenes set at the CIA were filmed in the basement of the Los Angeles Times Building.
As a historical piece, the film made use of archival news footage from ABC, CBS and NBC; and included popular songs from the era, such as "Little T&A" by The Rolling Stones (an anachronism, as it was not released until the following year), "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits, "Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen and "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. For its part, Warner Bros. used its 1972–1984 production logo featuring the "Big W" logo designed by Saul Bass for Warner Communications to open the film and painted on its studio lot's famed water tower the logo of The Burbank Studios (the facility's name during the 1970s and 1980s when Warner shared it with Columbia Pictures).
The screenplay used by the CIA to create their cover story was an adaptation of Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light. Producer Barry Geller had spearheaded an earlier attempt to produce the film using the original title. After that production attempt failed, the screenplay was renamed Argo and used by the CIA.
According to Tony Mendez, Studio Six—the phony Hollywood production office he helped create at the core of the CIA plan—proved so convincing that even weeks after the rescue was complete and the office had folded, 26 scripts were delivered to its address, including one from Steven Spielberg.
In April 2016, research by Vice, based on documents received under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that the CIA's public relations arm was involved in the production of the 2012 Argo, just as it provided information to a number of other American entertainment productions (such as the well-established case of the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty).
Music
Release and reception
Critical response Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 86 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale.
Naming Argo one of the best 11 films of 2012, critic Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote: "Ben Affleck's seamless direction catapults him to the forefront of Hollywood filmmakers turning out thoughtful entertainment." The Washington Times said it felt "like a movie from an earlier era—less frenetic, less showy, more focused on narrative than sensation," but that the script included "too many characters that he doesn't quite develop."Peter Suderman, Movie Review: 'Argo' , The Washington Times, October 11, 2012
Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert posited, Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, calling it "spellbinding" and "surprisingly funny", and chose it as the best film of the year, the last film he would choose for this honor before his death in 2013.Ebert, Roger (10 October 2012). Argo . Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved January 16, 2013. He also correctly predicted that it would win the Academy Award for Best Picture, following its presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Literary critic Stanley Fish wrote that the film is a standard caper film in which "some improbable task has to be pulled off by a combination of ingenuity, training, deception and luck." He goes on to describe the film's structure: "(1) the presentation of the scheme to reluctant and unimaginative superiors, (2) the transformation of a ragtag bunch of ne'er-do-wells and wackos into a coherent, coordinated unit and (3) the carrying out of the task." Although he acknowledged the film is good at building and sustaining suspense, he concluded that:
In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 244.
Reaction by Iranians Abolhassan Banisadr, foreign minister and then president during the incident, argued that the movie does not take into account the fact that most of the cabinet members advocated freeing all the American personnel quickly. Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian writer and radio figure of Iranian descent, thought the film had a "deeply troubling portrayal of the Iranian people." Ghomeshi asserted "among all the rave reviews, virtually no one in the mainstream media has called out [the] unbalanced depiction of an entire ethnic national group, and the broader implications of the portrait." He also suggested that the timing of the film was poor, as American and Iranian political relations were at a low point. University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole had a similar assessment, writing that the film's narrative fails to provide adequate historical context for the events it portrays, and such errors of omission lead all of the Iranian characters in the film to be depicted as ethnic stereotypes.
A November 3, 2012 article in the Los Angeles Times claimed that the film had received very little attention in Tehran, though Masoumeh Ebtekar, who was the spokesperson of the students who took the hostages and called only "Tehran Mary" in the film's credits, said that the film did not show "the real reasons behind the event". The film also ignores the importance of the date of the Embassy takeover. Mark Bowden, in his book on the subject, noted that November 4 was recognized as National Students' Day to acknowledge the student protesters killed by the Shah's police the year before. He also pointed out that this was the same date that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been exiled 15 years before.