Month: October 2012

In theaters.

Note: This review discusses the end of the movie because (A) it's based on a documented historical event, so fussing too much over "spoilers" seems silly and (B) this is what I want to write about, and it's my blog, so I can do what I want.

Argo definitely succeeds as a movie. The extraordinary premise—the escape from revolutionary Iran of American embassy workers disguised as Canadian filmmakers—captures the imagination immediately. The cast is almost completely composed of great character actors delivering spirited performances. The tonal shifts between tension and humor are odd, but somehow they work. The period touches—from the hilariously unattractive late-'70s fashions to the charmingly retro film work—are spot-on and compellingly immersive. It's a fun, exciting, inspiring movie.

Toward the end, though—when the Americans are almost made at the airport, and then the revolutionaries realize they've been tricked, and they shoot open the doors and race onto the runway to try to prevent the plane from taking off—I kind of wondered, wait, did this really happen too? And it turns out, no, it didn't. Numerous details have been fudged, both to simplify the escape (mainly by playing up the CIA's efforts and downplaying those of their Canadian counterparts, which is problematic in itself) and to make it more dramatic (all that running and shouting in the airport). Like many based-on-true-events stories, Argo has been moviefied.

Normally, I can't get too excited about this issue unless a film truly distorts a person's character or the import of an event—which I don't believe is the case here—but for some reason, with Argo, the distortions are what I keep coming back to when I try to write about the movie. Paradoxically, I'm more frustrated than I usually am with such cinematic misreporting and more inclined to forgive the elisions and narrative ruses. I am of two minds, and that's ultimately what I had to examine.

In theaters.

Time travel never makes much sense—ever—but Looper handles it much better than most. The trick, it turns out, is simply to acknowledge that it's crazy, that you'd need to diagram out the forking timelines if you truly wanted to keep track of it all, and even then the paradoxes would overwhelm you if you insisted on thinking about it too hard. Better not to, we're told a few times. Accept the rules that you're given, and go with it. So we do.

And it's worth it because Looper also nails the really crucial element of time-travel storytelling: the emotional logic. The actual mechanics might be nonsense, but the emotional connections between past and present and future ring true and resonate powerfully through all the explosions and gunshots of what is, besides, an exceptionally well made action movie—all the more exceptional for being able to finesse all that goofy time travel stuff.