Review: Argo (2012) is a terrific old-school historical thriller

Argo

2012

120 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

I've written a lot over the years about film punditry so seemingly starved for excellence that they will anoint mere craftsmanship as art.  Ben Affleck's Argo (trailer) is a crackerjack piece of filmmaking craft.  It is an astonishingly authentic representation of a rather important historical turning point, vividly capturing time and place with such skill that it genuinely feels like a film created in its time period.  It is rich with period detail and filled to the brim with top-notch character actors.  It is so engaging and so entertaining that I frankly don't care whether every allegedly non-fiction detail is true.  But ironically the picture's greatest strength as a movie arguably becomes its greatest flaw as a film.  It is not really about anything other than itself, refusing to infuse its narrative with any deeper meaning beyond our own knowledge of what happened next.  It is not a sober historical document but rather a caper film that happens to take place during a major moment in world history.  Like Moneyball, it is refreshingly lacking in perceived importance but also suffers from a lack of gravitas.

A masterpiece then and now: Why James Cameron's Titanic needs no defense.

This is an expanded and updated version of an essay I wrote on November 11th, 2007.  

It was right at the opening credit sequence. That haunting footage of the various passengers embarking on the ship, with a sorrowful version of the theme playing in the background (a version that inexplicably was never been included on the soundtrack CDs back in 1997/1998) As the cheering crowds gave way to the ship's watery grave and the title unfurled on screen, I leaned over to a friend and whispered "I already love this movie". It was a symbol right there of what made Titanic great and what separated it from the likes of Pearl Harbor or The Day After Tomorrow: the film openly acknowledged that every single life lost on that ship was every bit as tragic and unfair as the eventual fates of our leads. And, as the film played over the next six months, when you asked people what part they cried at, it wasn't anything to do with Jack or Rose. It was the mother reading to her children so that they might be asleep as they drowned in her arms. It was Victor Garber setting the clock just right before the water came pouring in. It was the ship's band leaving and then returning to play it out. For those primal moments, for the brilliant first-act demonstration of exactly how the ship sank so that we understood what was happening two hours later, for James Horner's achingly powerful score, and for any number of reasons that I shouldn't have to reiterate fifteen years later, Titanic is still a splendidly powerful bit of moviemaking, one of the best films of the 1990s, and one of the best pure blockbusters of our time.