Iron Man 3

I don’t know about Sophomore Jinxes, but the third film in a trilogy is almost always a tricky one. The thrill of discovery is gone after the first one, the assured handling and dramatic heft is covered by the second one, so what remains? Emotional baggage, mostly. (And killer mutant teddy bears sometimes, but that’s a bit of an outlier.)

Iron Man 3 traverses some of the same territory. The events of The Avengers where Tony Stark had to face Gods and supernatural entities have left him with, well, something like PTSD. If you’re a superhero, the last thing you want is a tendency to get anxiety attacks when someone mentions New York. His friends and loved ones — few though they may be — try to help, but in the end, you have to carry your armour and whatever else comes with it.

Tony has other kinds of baggage as well. His pre-Iron Man persona didn’t endear him to too many people, and some of those chickens have now come home to roost. And these birds are more than just angry — they’re seriously deranged, with the firepower to match.

So yeah, he has his hands full with demons both within and without. As good as the action is (and the 3D experience isn’t half-bad either), there’s only so far you can go with this material at this point in the franchise’s history.  What makes it work as a serviceable summer entertainer is the strength of two performances.

The first is not surprising: Robert Downey Jr. has always had a nice line in sass, but his ability to switch gears in the more dramatic moments is especially noteworthy. The sass is the more important characteristic, though: here it’s more than just a lovable character trait, it’s practically a survival skill. And since the Iron Man franchise has always been about him, the film relies on him to carry us through the portions where the action gets a bit tiresome.

The second is a man whose acting skills have never been in doubt, even if his choice of roles has been considerably dubious at times. But suffice it to say that Ben Kingsley steals the film from right under everyone’s nose. Forget wisecracking armour-clad superheroes, AI-systems that give as good as they get, fiery supervillains and gorgeous women — the real reason to watch this film is an aging British character actor who gets ten minutes of screen time, five of which are worth the price of admission. If that isn’t a superpower, I don’t know what is.

 

 

Django Unchained

In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino has achieved that rarest of feats (for him, anyway) — he has made a film that bored me to tears.

I make my case through the contrast between two exchanges. In Kill Bill Vol 2, there is a scene where Bill tells Beatrix the story of Pei Mei’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. He pauses in between (long, beautifully constructed) sentences to play on his flute, speaks slowly and really stretches out a small incident into something approximating an epic. Consider now the story of Broomhilda as related by Dr. King Schultz to Django. This is an actual epic, and you sense that Schultz can really relate the heck out of it, but Django is impatient and asks too many questions. The beauty of QT’s cinema is that his characters relish their dialogue to the point where the Universe — the audience, the camera, even the other characters in the scene — pauses and lets them speak, and cares not for such trivialities as plot and loaded guns and Mexican standoffs. Not here. As blood-soaked as his frames get sometimes, the principal reason why I love Tarantino’s films is the dialogue that precedes the bloodbath.

Now, this may seem like a minor quibble. One could even argue that Django’s approach is true to his character, even if the tale is diminished in its telling because of it. But the trouble is not with this scene per se. It is symptomatic of the film itself, which focuses more on what happens rather than on how it happens. There is the occasional moment to relish, such as an argument between some KKK members about the masks they’re wearing. But scenes like these are scant consolation in a long, bloody film. Too much gore is not a problem per se — too much gore without the prospect of anything entertaining in between is.

Why, you might ask, am I expecting humour and whimsy in a film about the abominable cruelty of slaveowners in the Deep South and the bloody revenge meted out by Django and Schultz? I submit that Tarantino’s subjects have never been all about sweetness and light anyway — his last film was set in Nazi-occupied France, for heaven’s sake! What makes his films so interesting to me is his ability to mine that thin vein of sublime ridiculousness even in subjects that nearly every other filmmaker would treat with grim fascination — half the time, your enjoyment comes from watching him get away with it. Without that critical ingredient, what remains is a lot of stylized violence, and the style wears thin after a point.

Understand that my problem is not with this movie being different from what he has made before. I would’ve been perfectly content, had he made a good movie that was unlike any of his previous ventures. In my opinion, this one simply isn’t all that good.

One cannot fault the actors here — given the material they have to work with, they do a damn fine job. Kerry Washington has precious little to do as the MacGuffin in this particular plot, but you can see why a man would walk through fire and fight a dragon for her. Jamie Foxx gives a surprisingly restrained performance, given the description of his character in the title. Christoph Waltz does wonderfully in a role that, post Inglourious Basterds, can now be described as the Christoph Waltz role. Samuel L Jackson is in fine form as usual, but this is not a big stretch for him as an actor.

The standout, for me, is Leonardo DiCaprio as the plantation owner Calvin Candie. Here is a performance that suggests that he could’ve perhaps taken a shot at playing Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York  — it is unlike anything DiCaprio has done so far, and he digs into it with palpable relish. His Calvin Candie directs the violence rather than personally indulge in it, and yet manages to convey the sense that he could explode any moment. A critical confrontation at the dinner table with Django and Schultz is handled with such fearsome intensity that it makes one wince. Django unchained can be fearsome, but Calvin unchained is a truly chilling prospect. He deserves better than this film.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

For most of its running time, Silver Linings Playbook fills the screen with people who don’t get along. So much time, in fact, that when we see them enjoy themselves, it feels like a small miracle.

Then again, the story is crowded with people who are dysfunctional in some form or shape. Pat Solitano Sr (Robert De Niro), whose problems are relatively minor in the scheme of things, is a gambler and sports nut who has been permanently banned from the Eagles stadium for fighting. His son Jr (Bradley Cooper) has just gotten out of a mental institution (against medical advice), where he was committed for extreme bipolar disorder resulting in a meltdown where he beat his wife’s lover half to death. Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the girl he meets at a friend’s place, is still dealing with her husband’s death — she used to deal with it through extreme promiscuity, but has calmed down a bit since then. The extended cast of characters bring their own baggage. Perhaps the only one without her own baggage is Pat Jr’s mom Dolores (Jackie Weaver), but living in this environment can’t be easy.  That she manages to look cheerful for the most part is another miracle in itself. Pat’s mantra after getting out of the mental institution has been to look for the silver lining (get in shape, get his wife back etc.) — he ought to be taking notes from his mom, who has the Hunt Brothers beat in cornering the market for silver.

So you realize that when you put these people together, you’re unlikely to get scene after scene of sunny laughter. The strange thing is, they are so intensely, uncompromisingly themselves that they make for fairly compelling viewing.  To observe these people trying to get on with their lives would be an interesting experience in and as of itself, but to tell an actual story cannot be easy, what with all of them getting in their own and each other’s way all the time.

What makes the story move, really, is the sheer force of nature that is Tiffany. It’s amazing how well Jennifer Lawrence does here, given how many notes she has to hit over the course of the film — grief, anger, need, ferocity, tenderness and the occasional scintilla of joy, all wrapped up inside this weird package. And despite all that complexity, she makes us empathize with her anyway. We search for a happy ending in this fruitcake factory of a situation simply because we want her to have one. Well, her and Pat Sr, in whose awkward, obsessive-compulsive character, De Niro mines a vein of sweetness that is as unexpected as it is gratifying.

When that ending does come (and to be honest, this is one place where the creaking of the plot machinery can be heard above the voices of the characters), we cheer for these two more than we cheer for anyone else. As far as this story is concerned, these guys are the silver lining. Pat Jr gets it in the end. Dolores knew all along. Maybe that’s what sanity is all about.

 

Zero Dark Thirty

There is an exchange in Zero Dark Thirty between the CIA Director and an agent named Maya, the protagonist of this film. She mentions that she got recruited to the CIA right out of high school and he asks her what she’s done so far. It turns out that pretty much the only thing she has done in the CIA is to hunt down the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

If Maya’s career in the CIA has boiled down to one thing, Jessica Chastain boils down her performance of Maya down to one note: dogged determination. Taken as a whole, Jessica Chastain’s short career so far has provided ample proof of her versatility. This film, however, is not about her range but her accuracy. I have no doubt that Chastain will win an Oscar in the fullness of time, but this film will most likely not put her on the podium.

While the broad historical contours of this story are well-known, Kathryn Bigelow casts this specific plot in a familiar Hollywood mould: The Woman With A Theory No One Believes. Maya pursues the theory that the best way to get to Osama is to find his trusted courier, a will-o-the-wisp named Abu Ahmed. Nearly everyone else is shown to focus on the more immediate problems plaguing the Western intelligence organisations at the time: find and avert further terrorist attacks. Screenwriting classes teach us that plots need conflict — this is the central one in this film.

So she pleads, cajoles, hectors and persuades her colleagues and superiors to help her on this mission of hers that nobody else seems to fully believe in. That she is right is what makes it work, but the interesting part is that her colleagues have excellent reasons to be sceptical of her conclusions for the most part. A lesser film would have portrayed her detractors as petty-minded bureaucrats with equal parts malice and ignorance, but Bigelow adopts a more even-handed approach here.

There is, however, a deeper conflict brewing, one that Maya is not even aware of. What happens once she achieves her objective? Given the methods used to extract information from captured terrorists and their contacts, methods that Maya is very much aware of and tacitly participates in, what bill will her soul present to her when all is said and done? Barring a few moments, Maya’s intensity never flags; you never get the sense that she even wants to think about this. For now, there is just the chase.

 

 

Special Chabbis

The last time Neeraj Pandey made a movie was nearly 5 years ago. It was a taut, two-character drama called A Wednesday and gave its stars — Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher — such good material to work with that their sheer joy at playing these characters shone through. The film was not without its flaws, but during its running time, one could not help but stay riveted.

Ordinarily, a good deed such as a well-made, well-received first movie does not go unpunished. The result is usually a bigger budget, bigger stars (with bigger egos) and — sadly enough, more often than not — a bigger but not necessarily better film.

Neeraj Pandey has indeed gotten himself a bigger budget. It has most probably gone towards paying a bigger star (Akshay Kumar) and mounting a more lavish production (the film is set in mid-eighties India, and the period detailing is wonderful). But here’s the thing: it seems like he has spent a good bit of the time since his first film doing something extraordinarily strange: writing a good script. The result is a film that has only a few (mostly forgivable) flaws, works for nearly its entire running length, and is practically crowded with good performances.

Caper movies, like this one about a bunch of con-men who pretend to be CBI officers conducting a raid and make off with the ill-gotten gains of the rich and powerful, are as much about character as about plot. In fact, the more entertaining the characters and their interactions, the less you worry about whether the plot holds together. And since crime capers usually hinge on so many things going precisely right at precisely the right time, it is very easy to poke holes in the plot afterwards. This one is no different. What makes it work is the sheer joy of the ride. 

And this joy is to be found in abundance in Special Chabbis. Let me start with the lesser players and work my way upwards. There is the henpecked husband (Kishor Kadam) whose day job seems to be washing his wife’s clothes and generally trying not to incur her wrath. And a lady constable (Divya Dutta) who essentially has one line of dialogue, repeated at various junctures, and yet manages to make you want to see more of her.

The bigger players have even more fun, maybe because they rarely get to have this much of it. Jimmy Shergill, who exuded toughness in A Wednesday, plays an earnest cop whose palpable chagrin at having been duped provides the punchline to nearly everything he says or does. Manoj Bajpayee, who is enjoying a welcome return to form these days, brings a fearsome intensity to his role as the cop on the trail of these con-men, but leavens it with a dash of wry humour (his specifically worded request for water at the end brings the house down). Akshay Kumar, who seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts playing second fiddle to seasoned character actors, brings every ounce of his star power to the Danny Ocean role, but doesn’t upstage the movie by it.

It is Anupam Kher, though, who is the star here. There are moments when his character’s nervousness reminds you of the one he played in Khosla Ka Ghosla, while at other times he displays the ferocity of his character in A Wednesday. The funny thing is, although the various shades of his character here find echoes in other characters he has played before, rarely has he had an opportunity to do so much in one film. Or, for that matter, in one single take. Watch how his body language changes in the course of a walk through a corridor. This is an actor at the peak of his powers, having an absolute ball in front of the camera.

Watching these people act is a pleasure in and as of itself, but watching them interact is the key here. Notice Akshay Kumar’s actions and facial expressions during his phone conversation with Anupam Kher on the eve of the latter’s daughter’s wedding. Listen to Manoj Bajpayee’s conversation with his boss about his promotion. There is no greater pleasure in cinema than spending a couple of hours in the presence of interesting characters who enjoy each other’s company enough to talk like that.

 

 

Viswaroopam

Warning: Beware of… nah, nothing here is a spoiler, given what the trailers give away. But who knows what someone might take umbrage at, so beware, anyway.

Okay, so what exactly is all the hoopla about? Or is it just me who is unable to see the offensive material packed into a story about an Al Qaeda plot set in New York City, with significant portions set in Afghanistan? What am I missing here? Never mind, let me focus instead on the film itself.

The story, which shuttles back and forth between two timelines and locations, involves a diabolical terrorist plot and a bunch of intelligence officers who work to foil it. The frenetic pace, slick production values and nonlinear storytelling makes it seem a lot more sensible that it does now in hindsight. Which makes it no better or worse than a number of entertaining action thrillers we’ve seen come out of Hollywood in the past.

Here’s the thing: You want to tell a story where complicated machinations lurk beneath a placid surface. So you start by showing the surface, and then rip that veneer apart in a series of dramatic action sequences. It’s a fair storytelling strategy and has worked well in a number of movies in the past. Trouble is, it isn’t a good story-building strategy. Why is that? You see, the story didn’t unfold backwards from the facade. The facade had to be the result of a logical sequence of events.

So, when an effeminate TamBram kathak teacher (played amusingly well, I might add) suddenly turns out to be someone else entirely, you are appropriately surprised, but when you try to reconstruct the story later, you realize that there is no earthly reason why he had to masquerade as said effeminate TamBram kathak teacher in the first place. The answer, of course, is simple: it gives Kamal an opportunity to play that character.

Having said that, there is much to like about this film. It is, as I said, pretty slick. The portions shot in Afghanistan are riveting. I don’t know how true to life it is, but it feels mostly plausible and works on screen. Sometimes the plotting is not just complex, but also left to be complex — I like a film that trusts its audience to fill in the gaps and doesn’t spell everything out. In the midst of all this, there is room for a little humor as well, including a cute inside joke about Dasavatharam.

That Viswaroopam isn’t the film it could’ve been is cause for disappointment, but this isn’t a bad film by any means. I’ll say this, though: Had they made this film in Hollywood with, say, Matt Damon, you would most likely not have seen him play a possibly-gay salsa dancer who enters into a marriage of convenience with a nuclear oncologist.

 

Snuff

When someone asks me what genre Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels fall under, my usual response is ‘comic fantasy’. But the truth is, I don’t read Pratchett for the laughs anymore, although I will readily vouch for the quality of his humor. No, these days I read his novels for their humanism. This might explain why I often find myself returning to his Watch novels starting Samuel Vimes, even though there is enough and more unread material waiting on my bookshelves.

Pratchett’s style has occasionally been described as stealth philosophy, which basically means that, while he’s making you laugh, he’s also slipping in a dose of his brand of philosophy. With the Watch novels, it isn’t quite as stealthy – he would basically pause between punchlines and deliver his punches, as it were, and there’s no way you wouldn’t notice when he does that. But the laughs do keep coming. Feet of Clay, for instance, has an utterly brilliant section towards the end where the golem Dorfl has an argument with the priests of Ankh Morpork. By the time you close the book, you’re still chuckling.

With Snuff, he bothers even less with the humor, idly picking at easy targets like marriage and scat on occasion, but staying focused on the dramatic content. It’s as if Pratchett, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, is trying to get Sam Vimes to dispense as much justice (“just ice”) as possible in Discworld before his own memory fails him, and can’t stop to engage in trifling wordplay. Note that I say this by way of description, not complaint.

The more crucial difference, though, is Vimes’ self awareness and intelligence. In the earlier books, he was a bit more of an earnest plodder with clear ideas on right and wrong, and would figure it all out eventually. In this one, you see a street-smart cop whose obstacles are not so much internal as external.

Take the case of the Summoning Dark, which had one of the more intriguing cameos in Thud. Here it makes an appearance as a mostly benevolent demon that helps Vimes. There is something anticlimactic about that. Again, like I said, Vimes seems to have matured internally into a self-aware hero, and mysteries don’t mystify him anymore, so his problems are more, shall we say, operational now.

His wife Sybil has a bigger role to play in this one, and it seems like her understanding of her husband is also much better. She has always understood what he did, and sometimes even assisted him in her own way, but one rarely saw her taking it personally. There is a scene where she urges him to seek justice for the goblins, and her vehemence is surprising, even to those who have known her long. There is also more than one mention of their sex life, something I frankly didn’t expect in a Pratchett novel.

From a philosophical standpoint, though, what has distinguished the earlier Watch novels is Pratchett’s insistence on the rule of law, even though his novels are populated with people who deserve a more vicious punishment. However, the man has lately begun to favor the more visceral forms of dispensing justice, like the encounter between Andy and Pepe in Unseen Academicals, or the late scene involving Willikins here. And while these scenes are satisfying in the obvious way, they are also a bit worrying. It feels, strangely, like a cop out.

These quibbles aside, Snuff represents yet another strong entry in the always excellent Watch series of novels. Will there be another before a Terry Pratchett goes gently into that good night? Maybe not, but Samuel Vimes will walk into the darkness knowing (and I daresay a little bemused) that he has had, not only a series of books (mostly about poo and farm animals) read aloud by him and another series written about him, but even one dedicated to him. Blackboard Monitors have never had it so good.

 

 

Madras Talkers

At this point, I suppose, I should define “we”. I refer to peole like me, born in Madras in the nineteen-seventies and ripening into cinematic awareness in the decade that followed, in Mani Ratnam’s decade. We are possibly the most qualified to write about Mani Ratnam. We might also be the least qualified.

– Conversations with Mani Ratnam: Introduction.

The above passage might serve to explain why I anticipated the arrival of this book like no other non-fiction book before it. I too count myself among the “we” that Baradwaj Rangan talks about. Born in the seventies, struck by the twin Sicilian Thunderbolts of Mouna Raagam and Nayakan. Felt, in a strange little way, disowned when Mani Ratnam went on to be owned by a larger audience after Roja.

Add to this the other “we” that a growing band of us now consider ourselves part of. The people who, come Friday morning, find ourselves keeping one tab in our browser constantly open to Blogical Conclusion and refresh it every few minutes to see if there’s a new post awaiting us.

Does it make my ilk uniquely qualified to talk about a series of conversations between Mani Ratnam and Baradwaj Rangan? Perhaps not so much, but it certainly makes the topic personal enough to want to write about.

With a book on film that involves a filmmaker and a film critic, one is tempted to get all meta and assign movie-like attributes to the book itself. This is not as much of a force-fit as it sounds. Conversations can be tricky. You have to strike a balance between covering the stuff you want to talk about and allowing it to flow in whichever direction the topic takes you. At its best, the conversation is smooth, yet wide-ranging. Sort of like a film that draws you in so completely that the maker’s skill occurs to you only in hindsight.

Cover art

The other aspect of these conversations is the comfort level that the two people seem to have with each other. The first chapter, which talks about, among other things, how Mani Ratnam came to be a director, is more in the nature of get-to-know-you chitchat. The tone is more biographical than conversational, but that is not to say that it is a dry, factual account. But as the book hits its stride, the dialogue gets more bilateral. There are questions where the man is predictably cagey, such as when he is asked about moving from Ilayaraja to Rahman. Then again, this isn’t meant to be a tell-all tome. For the most part, he is both articulate and detailed in his answers.

There are a few jarring transitions —  for instance, a conversation about Manisha Koirala in Bombay suddenly jump-cuts to a question on actors knowing how to enter and exit a scene, before getting back to her again. A conversation on tangled relationships in Dil Se suddenly gives way to one on the spiritual undertone to his songs. But these instances are few and far between. By and large, the shift from one topic to another seems organic and not forced. Towards the latter chapters (Kannathil Muthamittal onwards, especially), you just wish they’d keep talking.

The conversations are further enlivened by gentle tug-of-war between a critic’s intellectual viewpoint and a filmmaker’s refusal to let his work be mined for subtext. But this is not to say that Mani Ratnam is a purely instinctive filmmaker who doesn’t think in layers — his closing remarks in the chapter on Iruvar, and his comments on micro- and macro-conflicts in Kannathil Muthamittal are cases in point. His viewpoint, I suppose, comes from the fact that the final product we see is a function of what he originally conceived as well as what transpired on set.

Somewhere in the first chapter, Mani talks about the challenge of translating an abstraction (a scene as it is written) into reality (the scene as it is filmed) and being flexible about the things that change while not letting go of its essence. A macro version of the same idea comes up in the chapter on Mouna Raagam, where he reveals that the whole Manohar (Karthik) subplot was put in as a way of making Divya’s viewpoint more credible/palatable to audiences. Entertaining as it was, it might not have been there at all, had Mani made this film later in his career. Other instances, such as the case of a window in Kannathil Muthamittal, pop up here and there.

But at the end of the day, the fact is, we don’t notice the scaffolding. Or want to, for that matter.

 

Thuppakki

What is this fascination for intelligence officers in mainstream Indian cinema these days? There was Agent Vinod, a secret agent who seemed to get caught so often and in so many countries that he clearly ought to have picked a different line of business. And Ek Tha Tiger, whose ridiculousness was redeemed by the fact that the titular character was played by a man who can play ridiculous better than anybody else in the business. And now Thuppakki, where the hero’s actions veer between spooky clairvoyance and abject stupidity. Why is it so difficult to make a film about an intelligence officer who deserves the adjective? Most of these guys have IQs that lie somewhere in-between furniture and retarded simian. The scripts are, if anything, worse.

The premise isn’t half bad — a military intelligence officer on vacation in Mumbai discovers the existence of sleeper cells about to awaken, and winds up preventing a series of terror attacks on the city. And the villain isn’t so bad either — aside from some of the usual movie villain malaises like the Talking Killer Syndrome and I-can-beat-you-with-my-bare-hands Syndrome, he seems to think rationally and makes for a worthy adversary. Had the protagonist relied on something more than Tamil-Hero-Awesomeness to beat him, this could’ve been a gripping thriller involving spy-versus-spy machinations played out on an urban battlefield.

The possibility of him having a team of collaborators is briefly flirted with, and then abandoned in favour of giving him sidekicks. His best friend plays a sub-inspector with the Mumbai police — given what he has to accomplish during the course of the film, wouldn’t an ACP have made more sense? Ah, but no, the man has to provide “comic relief” by showcasing his incompetence and genuflecting at the altar of the hero — a man who is actually competent at his job would’ve made that difficult. On the upside, genuine comic relief is provided by Jayaram, whose performance belongs in a screwball comedy; for the precious few minutes when he’s on screen, we can actually treat the film as such.

A fair bit of screen time is spent on Kajal Agarwal, who does justice to an extraordinarily shabby character sketch with a performance that equals it. Their romantic subplot reminds me of an exchange at the beginning of The Big Bang Theory, where Leonard takes one look at Penny and goes, “Our children will be smart and beautiful,” to which Sheldon adds, “Not to mention imaginary.” Given what these two people bring to the gene pool, imaginary would be a blessing.

 

 

Argo

A CIA agent manages to help six Americans stranded in Iran by making them impersonate a Canadian film crew scouting for locations for a Star Wars-esque sci-fi action extravaganza named Argo. Now, this is Iran at a time when Khomeini has just ascended to power, and anti-American sentiment is at its peak. And these guys say they want to shoot a movie there? Does it even sound plausible? Simply put, there is no way in hell someone would’ve green-lighted a movie with such a plot unless it had actually happened. For that matter, it’s a wonder the CIA green-lighted the operation to begin with.

But they did, and it did happen, and Argo tells us how, in scenes of gradually building tension interspersed with moments of levity. We know from the start that lives are at stake here. Affleck wisely realizes that the threat of  violence is far more effective than the sight of it, so he ratchets up the tension by showing us angry mobs, men with guns, dead bodies and news reports about the violence, but not too much actual killing. The intent is to convey fear, not shock. And we see all of this through the eyes of the Americans and Canadians — the outsiders, as it were.

The prologue informs us that the public anger stems from private grief over the past decades, for which the Americans were at least partially responsible. It is entirely possible that these stranded Americans know this, even if they weren’t responsible for it. But the film does not explore this possibility — it is concerned with the here and now, where six men and women live in constant fear of discovery and almost-certain death. In a key scene, you see an Iranian shouting at them in Farsi, and the film wisely does not provide us with subtitles (whereas some other conversations in Farsi have them) — we feel just as lost as they are. By focusing on their fear and showing “the other side” through their uncomprehending and fearful gaze, the film makes us sympathize with their plight without thinking any further. One might perhaps wish for a more even-handed treatment in a film that wishes to make a political point, but for a thriller, it is the right strategy.

The humour comes from the scenes featuring the makeup man John Chambers (John Goodman) and the producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), who wisecrack their way through the process of making this fake movie-within-the-movie. As funny as these exchanges are, our laughter is tinged with a certain desperation, because we are always aware of what is at stake here. Still, it is not easy to make the tonal shift in those scenes without leaving the viewer feeling yanked around. The credit lies partly with the performers — Goodman and Arkin have a sort of low-key screen presence, so they draw us in without demanding that we give them our full attention. In some ways, they come across almost like a Greek chorus.

Now, with the mention of a Greek chorus and a title like Argo, you might be forgiven for wondering if the Sci-fi movie-within-the-movie has any relation to the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts. To which my response is… nah, I suggest you see the film and find out what the appropriate response ought to be.