Last night the Leeds International Film Festival kicked off with Argo, which Ben Affleck both directed and starred in. Now, I don’t really pay that much attention to Hollywood projects very often, so I’ll admit that I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, even though it’s apparently big news.
I was pleasantly surprised. Sort of.
Argo has at least two films in it, and at least one of them is quite good. It dithers a bit between whether it wants to be serious or comic, commits to neither and kind of crosses back and forth somewhat awkwardly. The opening, in which the (real historical) Iranian hostage situation unfolds suggests the film was keen to take quite an interesting approach, treading quite carefully in what it did. There does seem to be a degree of sympathy towards both the American embassy staff and the rioting Iranians, neither side being explicitly vilified. The behaviour of the embassy staff, whose first priority when the building is attacked is to shred all their documents, gently suggests that possibly they were doing work that went a little beyond their diplomatic roles.