ARGO: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH

With its copping of best picture and best director masks at the Baftas, on top of the DGA award, Argo has become the front-runner for the Oscar, which is interesting given its opposition. Argo is a very likeable film, well-made, with real suspense in its last act, and an atmosphere of menace in Iran and Washington both, contrasted with an atmosphere of anarchic freedom and humour in Hollywood.

Which is why, call me cynical, I'd popped Argo as an Oscar favourite as soon as I saw it, for two connected reasons which both have to do with Hollywood's perception of itself. The first is obvious—as much as the movie shows the CIA saving the day, it is the Hollywood producer (in fact the film's only totally fictional western character) and make-up guy who actually come up with the goods, and in the process provide us with self-satirizing boffo yucks. The second is related: the Tehran rescue contrasts with the failed attempt at rescuing the hostages in the US embassy—the signal moment of Jimmy Carter's administration. Carter gets little credit for the Argo rescue (neither do the Canadians—more on that later) but the upshot of his failure was turn to the country over to Hollywood, in the person of Ronald Reagan, who was selling America fantasies they wanted to believe, as opposed to Carter's visions of grim reality. That we now know Reagan's people made an October Surprise deal with the Iranians, not to make any hostage-releasing deal until after the 1980 elections merely reinforces the point. Reagan's election saw the US enter a post-reality based world, in which it is still entrapped, and Argo may best be viewed, depending on your political perspective, as a reminder of what the real world was like, or, more likely, a reminder that the people who brought you the world of fantasy are the only ones to trust.

Or you might perceive Argo as a 'feel-good' version of Zero Dark Thirty, in which the CIA are heroes and the interrogations are mostly John Goodman's John Chambers torturing Ben Affleck's Tony Mendez with Hollywood insider info. Or you might see it as a positive nod to a can-do America that, despite its thriller-matic finish, is actually accomplished more easily than, say, Lincoln's emancipation of black slaves was via American democratic process.

The movie itself skips between genres cleverly—and is most effective for its reconstruction of the period—not just sets and costumes but also the dirty grainy look of the film itself, which is pure 70s, and encourages the audience old enough to remember films you didn't download to transport itself back to the days of those sorts of political thrillers. In fact, there are shots of Mendez in the CIA HQ which straightforwardly evoke All The President's Men, in case you're old enough and missed the point. Ben Affleck doesn't ignore facts—the CIA's role in installing the Shah as dictator is set out right at the top—but the trope is an old one of maverick within a flawed system who eventually gets that system to do the right thing. In this contxt, Affleck the director is very good with actors in ensemble roles, much like Clint Eastwood. Affleck's ensemble contains many faces in familiar roles, faces who espcially shone in such parts on quality TV: Titus Welliver, Zeljko Ivanek , Clea DuVall (Carnivale), Tate Donovan, and Kyle Chandler (as Hamilton Jordan). Less like Clint is also good at minimising his own part, which is good because Ben Affleck the actor still has limitations when it comes to carrying a film—I think he works best as a straight man. I still believe George Reeves was Affleck's best role, and that may be at least partly because he sensed a kindred talent.

There were, however, moments that left me feeling uneasy, that I was being manipulated, particularly in the rousing end sequence at Tehran airport. It struck me as odd that the children would have put together the right photo at just the wrong time; that the guards would chase a Swiss Air commercial flight down the runaway, firing at it; that the pilot would not notice any of that, and that the tower would not simply stop the plane's takeoff, if they thought spies were escaping. As it happens, none of those things are true: the departure from the airport went off without a hitch (for reasons described below). But you couldn't have the suspense without tampering with the facts. I was even more sceptical of the guard making a phone call to the film's production office in LA, for two reasons: one being long-distance calling and time zones, and the other being why would a Canadian film crew not have a Canadian office number, and why would a phone number in the Babylon of America not arouse suspicion?

There has been a lot of discussion in this year's Oscar run-up about historical fact—what with Zero Dark Thirty trying to have it both ways about torture, and Lincoln being accused of being Caucacentric, and also gilding the lily of remembrance by anointing its hero prematurely, or Django inventing sunglasses and a pre-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. Much of the criticism is unjustified, in the sense that film scripts will inevitable consolidate multiple characters and re-order events to serve their own purpose. Thus, the fact that most of the hostages stayed not with the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (played very well by the Candian actor Victor Garber) but with one of his assistants, John Shearwood, is hardly crucial; it makes dramatic sense to keep them all together. The scene in which the Brits and Kiwis turn the refugees away is also apparently false: the Brits took them in and Kiwis transferred them to the Canadians, where it was thought they would fit in more naturally and be safer. The jibe,if gratuitous, does serve to emphasize the plight of the Americans, and obviously the Bafta voters didn't hold it against Argo.

But it should be pointed out that the Canadians did far more than simply sit back and wait for the CIA cavalry to arrive (shades of Independence Day!). In fact, Ambassador Taylor manipulated his staff's travel to help create the necessary visas, and it was the Canadians who got the airplane tickets—thus the whole cancellation and restoration by the CIA sub-plot is fiction.

I was also put off a bit by the separated husband/lonely father sub-plot for Tony Mendez; Affleck plays it with suitable moroseness, but as it turns out, it too is a fictional construct. The reason for it is obvious and familiar—Mendez not only has to redeem himself at the CIA but he has to conquer personal adversity along the way; this is the arc that dominates Hollywood—though they just couldn't figure out a way to have Abe Lincoln reunited with Mary Todd at movie's end.

Complaining that Alan Arkin's Lester Siegel didn't really exist would be silly—they need him to carry those sections, and his double-act with Goodman is one of the high points of the film. In reality, another special-effects genius, Robert Siddel, who did ET, was announced as the co-producer with Chambers when the ads went into the trades. Interesting, the original screenplay was based on Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light, one of the key sf novels of the Sixties, and the film was intended for use in an sf theme park that never happened. Michael Parks has a cameo as comics genius Jack Kirby, who actually did draw the storyboards for the fake film, which also had Ray Harryhausen and Buckminster Fuller attached to it (!). Which ought to be enough to get Lord Of Light made, after all these years. I'm sure they could get Lester Siegel to produce. He could make the 'argo fuck yourself' joke another twenty times, and get a laugh every time.

DENNIS LEHANE WALKS THE MOONLIGHT MILE

It's been twelve years since Patrick Kenzie found Amanda McCready, returned the four year old to her negligent mother, saw her kidnappers jailed, and broke up with Angie Gennaro. Patrick and Angie got back together, and now have a daughter of their own. Angie's more or less out of the private eye business, studying to work with Downs Syndrome children, and Patrick's trying to get a staff job being perpetually dangled in front of him by a big-time agency, so he'll do the kind of work he despises for the kind of people he despises. And then Amanda, now 16, goes missing again, and her aunt Beatrice knows how to appeal to the guilt Patrick feels.

Dennis Lehane returned to Kenzie and Gennaro after a ten year hiatus that saw the huge jump forward of Mystic River, which of course rode the success of Clint Eastwood's film. He followed that up with Shutter Island, a daring and offbeat novel rather than one designed to capitalise on Mystic River's success. That one became a Martin Scorsese film, and he went on to script for The Wire, so there was little predicting his next book, the remarkable historical novel The Given Day. When I interviewed Lehane about The Given Day, we talked about the return of Kenzie and Gennaro, and Lehane explained it simply: 'he (Patrick) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head'. I asked if the voice he heard was Casey Affleck's, who had played Patrick in his brother Ben's faithful adaptation of the Amanda story, Gone Baby Gone. He said 'no, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind'. (You can read the whole interview here)

To an extent, that's a problem with Moonlight Mile, because it's hard now to separate Affleck's protean ability to enter a character and reflect his inner workings from the Patrick we may have imagined. If anything he adds depth, and Lehane himself was scared by the task. 'Do I still have that looseness,' he wondered. 'They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance.'

Patrick remains an unlikely detective hero. His world sometimes seems to be an extension of high school, where he was not quite tough or cool enough to be successful, or become a target, but just cool and smart enough not to be a mark. And trying to locate Amanda quickly throws him in over his head, because her mother Helene and Helene's latest loser boyfriend are tied in with the Russian mob, and a hit man named Yefim who's got almost as funny a line of ironic patter as Patrick. Of course Patrick finds Amanda, he's too good and dogged not to, and everything gets far more complicated than he could have imagined. Which is what happened in Gone Baby Gone, and as in that book Patrick needs to make a decision. But this time the decision is informed by his added age, his added responsibility as a father, and his exposure to the results of his moral decision twelve years earlier.

Lehane does a nice job of picking up his characters and allowing them their changes. He's as sharp as ever; Patrick remains a knowing-smart ass; 'I see a future for you in self-help,' he says to a drug-addled youth counselor who's made some bad decisions. At times it seems this book is more consciously funny than its predecessors, but that may be because it is more informed by the world around Kenzie and Gennaro; the concerns of Mystic River, The Wire, and The Given Day are never far away. It is not a world gone well: the shadow of economic inequality, of injustice, of greed, hangs over everyone in the novel. Lehane's remarkably straight-forward about society's failures; a dog-walking woman in western Massachusetts launches into a fantastic diatribe against the perverted values of our education system that could have come right out of The Wire. And, if I may be indulged one pedantic quibble, his sense of geography remains odd; in The Given Day a train took an impossible route to New York; in Moonlight Mile there's a house in western Mass 'south of the New York border', which is weird because the border runs almost due north-south!

There is almost an inevitability to the denouement, and Patrick in particular is again forced into decisions that make him question how best he can be true both to himself and those he loves. And follow the responsibilities of society as well. He's helped a bit by a twist which some may see coming; but it's no small task, just as revisiting a successful series more than decade later wasn't. Lehane has written the kind of comeback novel any writer would admire; he has questioned his characters, and let them find their own way. It's another fine achievement.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane
Little Brown, £15.99 ISBN 9781408703137

This essay will also appear at Shots: www.shotsmag.co.uk

IT'S HARD FOR ME TO WRITE UNLESS WHAT I'M DOING SCARES ME: THE DENNIS LEHANE INTERVIEW

It wasn't difficult for me to finish Dennis Lehane's new novel, The Given Day, before I got on a plane for Tampa and the Super Bowl, which I was broadcasting for the BBC. What was difficult was carrying it! My main regret was the proof copy was so big I didn't bring it with me; the notes I'd taken had stopped being comprehensive as I got more and more caught up in its many-layered story, eventually I was just jotting down some of the best lines and my admiration of the way he made the structure work. The novel is another quantum leap for a writer who'd already made one such jump, from his Kenzie and Gennaro books to Mystic River; it's an historical novel centered on the Boston police strike of 1919. It's also his first novel in five years, and worth the wait; I'd say it falls somewhere between Mystic River and E.L. Doctorow. It's a risky book too, because Lehane's stock as a 'crime writer' has never been higher, and though the novel is set among the police, and a corrupt police lieutenant is a great villain, worthy of any crime drama, the parameters of the story go far beyond that, to issues of race and class, immigration and melting pots, of unions and management, of government control and government's purpose, and of baseball.

It's a daring move, an epic novel from a writer who's one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, and thus far very well served by the movies. Not only was Mystic River made into a superb film by Clint Eastwood, but Ben Affleck directed brother Casey in a remarkable adaptation of Gone Baby Gone, which seemed to fall lamentably between the cracks when the awards season began. Martin Scorsese is filming Lehane's gothic thriller Shutter Island, a challenge to adapt for the screen, and Lehane himself has scripted for The Wire, the epic TV cop show.

I'd arranged to meet Lehane the day after the game, and that Monday it was pouring down rain in St. Petersburg, so I appreciated the old-fashioned portico protecting the sidewalk on the block of Central where the restaurant Bella Brava, incongruously chic and modern, is located. As it turned out Lehane had been at the game too (he actually met his wife at a Super Bowl party!), so we talked football and Bruce Springsteen's halftime show for a while, and noted how this rain seemed to be washing away all trace of the game from the area. He'd just finished with the annual writer's conference he runs at Eckerd College, where he did his own degree in writing; he doesn't spend much of his time in his native Boston anymore, living most of the year in St. Pete with his wife, who's an opthamologist there, and doing his writing in a downtown office. Lehane looks like a character from one of his Boston books, and sounds like it too, so I ask him about his time as a student at Eckerd, which must have been a big change from Boston.
DL: It got me to switch to decaf, if you will. To calm down. I wrote very minimalist at the time, and you could say I've been working away from that.
It's odd, because The Given Day is such a big book, but with its concerns with race and class, and the way you tell the big picture with smaller personal stories, it reminded me a lot of The Wire.
DL: Well, that all predates The Wire, the issues of class and race. My first novel was about race war standing in for class warfare, and that was the point of the last page of that book, if I can give myself props, cause I wrote it in 1990 (it was published in '94), I thought was the best thing I'd written. But The Wire, what it taught me in the last four years was distillation, and structure in a different way. The novelist's structure is unwieldy, and you don't realise how much so until you try an epic. Without The Wire I might have produced a 900 page book.
When I started reading The Given Day, it seemed familiar; the opening scene recalls The Natural, with Babe Ruth getting off the train, and Don DeLillo opened Underworld with the 1951 playoff. But what you did with it, both as framing, and commentary on the story, was impressive, and the way baseball comes back into the main story too, in just a small but significant way.
DL: Do you know the writer Stewart O'Nan? (Here we digress to discuss, as fellow Boston Red Sox fans, Faithful, a book O'Nan co-wrote with Stephen King about the Sox 2004 World Series win, the win which canceled Ruth's so-called 'Curse of the Bambino', and finally rewarded all us long-suffering followers). He has a concept he calls the 'natural clock container', and for me that was Ruth. My clock was from the 1918 World Series to Ruth's sale to the Yankees, and the police strike was the story contained within that container. It's the kind of thing you rarely see done on TV, because it's hard to follow one big story, there's too much indulgence, it's what stopped Twin Peaks, say, from being as great as it could've been. But the story has to stay true to its spine. I'd write stuff for The Wire that I'd love and at the story meetings they'd say 'that's great, but how does it pay off to the ending?', and they were right.
There's a great sense in The Given Day of things reflecting the past eight years in America, particularly in the way the powers that be, including J Edgar Hoover, invite trouble, as an excuse for repression. That's before John Hoover became J. Edgar, and the Bureau of Investigation became the FBI, and it's a great untold story about repression...
DL: Well, I don't think there's a single human being who's not a dirty bomb in Manhattan away from tromping all over civil liberties...
There's a great line, when James J. Storrow, who's sort of the enlightened upper-class, says of the police chief, Edwin Curtis, 'such men fiddle while cities burn...such men love ash'. Curtis, Hoover, governor Calvin Coolidge: we see their equivalents in government today.
DL: Thanks, I'm glad you liked the line, but there's no pat answer for the 'meaning' of the book. If it was pure good and bad, it wouldn't be interesting...
And the FBI agent Rayme Finch sees it, he says 'people don't want truth they want certainty, or the illusion of it.'
DL: Finch was a real character; he was the first Melvin Purvis, a superstar agent, who overshadowed Hoover. But what he's talking about, that's the human impulse.
It reminded me in a lot of ways of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
DL: Hammett is so great. I have to go back and read that again. Everyone goes back to Chandler, but Hammett's where it starts.
It's interesting too that, in the end, the only union that saves the characters is the marriage union...
DL: I knew I was writing about unions, about all aspects of the word union. If you look back at my books you'll see I'm playing with one word or concept. But if you have to tell people what the ending means, it means you haven't done your job.
The Given Day is such a departure from your previous work; it's as big a jump from that as Mystic River was from your detective novels.
DL: It's hard for me to write unless what I'm doing scares me on some level, unless it's something I haven't done before. I have to stay as loose as possible, you can't worry about what people want. What you owe your audience is a great performance.
But with your next book you're going to return to Kenzie and Gennaro?
DL: Yes, it's ten years later, and it scares me. Do I still have that looseness? They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance. But he (Patrick Kenzie) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head.
Was it Casey Affleck's voice?
DL: No, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like what I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind. But it worked. Only Ben and Casey knew what they were doing there, well, them and the DP (John Toll, cinematographer) but they could see it. Obviously, Patrick has aged, he's not 32 anymore.
You say 'flirted with self-importance'. I read an interview with you, and you talked about success and how you could've become 'a real dick', and your first marriage blowing up. But it wasn't clear in that interview, was this cause and effect?
DL: No, I had lost my wife and home, and then the book (Mystic River) took off. That's when I could've turned into a prick. But that's when I was able to put things into perspective. I tell my students don't become a writer because you need to self-actualise. Go to a therapist! So many have no idea of who they are, they think if they become successful it will tell them who they are, but it doesn't fill that part. I was secure, but with an incredible ego. What's dangerous is when you have the incredible ego but you're still insecure.
It sounds like a definition of Hollywood.
DL: It's so amazing to meet people there who are secure in themselves. They're talented, but it's their work. Ed Harris was like that, just so impressive. It's funny, because when Ben Affleck was shooting Gone Baby, he was shooting lots of coverage, and everyone was looking at each other saying, he must be be scared. If you shoot a lot of coverage either you're scared, or, if you're someone like Scorsese, you're a genius. Turned out, Ben knew exactly what he was doing.
Scorsese is making Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio. That novel was a real departure for you.
DL: I'd tried to jump on the bus and I felt like I'd be hanging on the side for the rest of my life.The first time I'd met Richard Price, who was a literary idol of mine, he asked what was the goofiest thing I could do, and I said write a gothic novel, and I figured if Richard Price didn't laugh me out of the room, I might as well try.
It seems a hard book to adapt for the movies
DL: Well, the script is terrific, and Scorsese's directing. With all that in play, it's all down to alchemy (laughs).
In your early books, and in both the first films, child abuse is a major theme.
DL: I worked with abused kids, as a counselor, and I had to stop. It was an obsession of my early writing, but it's tough, there's a fine line between calling attention to it, and exploiting the issue for entertainment. But coming up in the 80s, in writing workshops, the hardest thing to justify was the killing of a child, or writing about the holocaust. It was like you skipped twenty steps for empathy. It was like when I saw an ad for The Boy In Striped Pajamas. Children and the Holcaust, I said 'enough!'. But seriously, I sealed it for myself with Mystic River, and I don't have to go back there again.
We discussed films for a while, how The Wrestler revisited great 70s movies like Fat City or The Scarecrow. I was looking forward to seeing Gran Torino that night, and we talked Clint Eastwood, and eventually whether the shot of the little boy looking out the back seat of the car was a shot too much in Mystic River; a habit I'd suggested in my book about Clint that he had, when he wanted to make sure he hooked the audience. And finally we got down to the greatest line of dialogue in American film, and we were only a beat apart. For Lehane it's William Holden as Pike Bishop, in The Wild Bunch, saying 'let's go'. I'd always been more partial to Warren Oates' reply: 'why not?', but no, Lehane said, 'Holden's line is action, and Oates' is reaction'. 'Nilhilstic reaction,' I said, 'which is why I liked it'. 'But it's 'let's go' that defines the movie, and them,' he said, and thinking about it, he was right in an American hsitorical sense, even if Oates' line seems more purely Peckinpah, a signal of change, perhaps. 'Did you know,'Lehane asked, 'that Peckinpah wrote a whole scene for that, that they told him to cut, and he shot so little usable that 'let's go' was basically all that was left.' 'So he didn't start out minimalist, like you, he was just edited that way?' I said. There is a sense sometimes that big stories demand their own space, and in The Given Day it seems that Lehane has used no more space than that story demands. It's a major achievement.

NOTE: This interview also appears on Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk
THE GIVEN DAY is published by Doubleday, ISBN 9780385615341