Argo (4K UHD + Blu-ray)

Hollywood did itself proud to award this perfectly-crafted thriller the Academy Award for 2012. It’s guaranteed to have you at seat’s edge, so knotted up that you’ll be constantly looking at your watch not out of boredom but to be assured that the unbearable tension can’t go on forever.Graham Greene was a writer who distinguished between his deep, soul-searching works and his who-dunnit-style mysteries, calling the former “literature” and the latter “entertainments.” “Argo” definitely shines as a stellar example of the latter. Unlike the socio-theological examination of life that we get from “There Will Be Blood” or “No Country for Old Men” (or, for that matter, Shakespeare’s tragedies), “Argo” pieces together an historical moment with such resourceful precision that we can only marvel at the craft of the director, which manifests a restraint, patience and attention to detail comparable to that of the Iranian children whom we witness piecing together the evidence of what we’re seeing from the thousands of strips that have been confiscated from the overrun American Embassy.In the script John Goodman, while helping Affleck construct the ruse that will permit him to free six Americans, calls directors stupid know-nothings, assuring Affleck that the American posing as a director has the easiest role of all. At the end of the film, when the plane is finally off the ground, that individual playing a film director approaches the real director, Affleck, and extends his hand as a gesture of thanks and admiration. As viewers we might do the same. However it was done, “Argo” is at once a delicate balance and an infinitely complex mosaic of small pieces. Yet, in the grand Hitchcock manner, nothing is wasted, nothing is gratuitous. Every piece fits so well that for two hours we return to a moment in Iran in 1979. If we leave the theater none the wiser, we also leave it marveling at where we have just been and what we have just seen. Acting, spectacle, film scoring–all of these components of a movie are strangely irrelevant in “Argo.” All we’re left with is the film. There is absolutely no room for clutter.We knew going in that Jason’s journey was sheer fantasy and that the movie within the movie (“Argo”) was a sheer ruse. Yet we need no convincing that the “Argo” we’ve just experienced was as real and believable as a film can be. If Affleck’s Argo played somewhat loose with the facts, it proves no less compelling than the mythological Argo–or the deception that proved successful to the mission. In fact, the film succeeds because of the believability of 3 Argo’s: the mythological story that has captivated readers for many centuries; the film fantasy concocted to contrive a release of the prisoners; the film we have just viewed and experienced for two breathless hours.There are three definitions of film that in my experience account for the compelling power of this art form to strike the sparks of truth from the stuff of imagination. Orson Welles’ “Ribbon of Dreams” is not nearly as flimsy and fantastical as it may initially appear. From the scenario proposed by Affleck’s character to the blocking out of characters and action, the entire project hung explicitly on cinema’s hold on the imagination, its power to engage the viewer in a willing suspension of disbelief no less “real” than the most vivid dream or nightmare. Second is Jean Luc Godard’s definition, “film is truth 24 times a second,” reminding us that film in our post-Einstein quantum-mechanical world of the “dynamic” comes closer to representing a reality that is always changing, capturing our present experience more accurately than any form that restricts meaning to a “Bergsonian, knife-edge instant.”But it finally is Siegfried Krackauer’s definition of film that brings to film its moral compass while emphasizing the awesome responsibility of the filmmaker. At its best, film has the potential, beyond any other visual form, of being a “redemption of physical reality.” The very last words of the film, some of the first from a recognizable public figure, are those of Jimmy Carter, who validates all that we have just seen, providing that final piece of evidence (while satisfying Krackhauer’s requirement) that we need to make Argo more than a myth, a story, even a movie. It’s an historical experience, one that has been saved from all the competing “noise” in politics, war and history to resonate in our imaginations long beyond the lives of any of its participants, creators, and possibly even later participants.Post-script: seeing “Argo” during the Easter season and in view of Krackauer’s contention, I couldn’t help but muse over film’s redemptive quality in relation to the Incarnation and Resurrection. Conclusion: film can preserve the miracle of the Incarnation, representing figures who appear to represent a supernatural, or spiritual, ancestry. It cannot however work in the reverse direction, however, suspending the physical and temporal world of experience for the sake of representing the supernatural. The same lens that verifies the fleshliness of the spiritual is powerless to demonstrate the spiritual component of the physical world. In fact, there is no film director, no medium, no church, no creed, no book, no tradition capable of making the case for the divine in the material world. As Tennyson puts in, “There lives more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds.” Proof of the resurrection, in fact, demands doubt in the evidence of the eye, the ear, the mind–with respect to the existence of the divine the material world is a dark veil of ignorance penetrable only by the individual’s spiritual eye of belief.