ARGO

There was a time, not so long ago, when Ben Affleck was best known as one half of Bennifer, the other half being Jennifer Lopez, in an amorous relationship that attracted international publicity and no little ridicule.

Not any more, though. In the last few years he has brilliantly re-invented himself as the director of Gone Baby Gone; The Town and now – quite the best of all – Argo. The latter indeed is being widely tipped for Oscar nominations and deserves no less.

It’s a remarkable story, which, though based in truth, you feel only Hollywood could have dreamed up, and in more ways than one Hollywood did dream it up.

In 1979 in a furious spat, because America wouldn’t return the Shah to be hanged after a fair trial, an Iranian mob stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 50-odd members of the staff hostage. Six, however, escaped and sought refuge in the Canadian Embassy, where their presence had to remain a secret to protect Canada’s diplomatic status.

So far, OK, but here’s the rub: if they should now be captured by the mob they would be treated not as hostages, but as spies, and executed. How to get them out?

Well, in Washington, Tony Mendez (Affleck) a CIA ‘extractor’ comes up with a cunning plan worthy of Baldrick. With the help of a Hollywood make-up man (John Goodman) and a producer (Alan Arkin) he acquires a movie script called Argo (a Star Wars rip-off set in a desert), publicises it, advertises it and has a storyboard drawn up.

Armed with all this, Mendez will fly to Tehran, instruct the six refugees on how to behave like movie people, provide them with false identities and extract them from their hiding place under the guise of a Canadian film unit looking for locations.

His bosses are not too impressed. ‘Haven’t you got a better bad idea?’ they ask. No, he says, this is our best bad idea.

And it worked. In fact the rescue went without a hitch but this is a movie and in a movie a rescue without hitches is a no-no. So Affleck, considerably aided by Chris Terrio’s excellent screenplay, builds palm-sweating tension as we follow the six out of the embassy and through a Tehran airport swarming with armed men on the lookout for them.

And all the while the head honchos in Washington are planning to pull the plug on the whole scheme.

What is particularly impressive about Argo is the seamless way it mixes the frightening violence of the early sequence – the mob besieging the American Embassy – with the refugees’ fear of discovery and the wit and humour of the Hollywood scenes.

Here Arkin and Goodman, both inveterate scene-stealers anyway, are at their very best. Affleck, bearded and long-haired in the fashion of the 1970s, is good, too. He may not quite be an A-lister as a Hollywood actor but on this evidence, he is well on the way to becoming one as a director.