MARY TYLER MOORE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the actress Mary Tyler Moore went online at the Guardian last night; I had written it a few months ago. You can link to it here. It is as I wrote it, and I hope it conveys my fascination with the parallels between her life and her on screen roles. Even the way she entered the business, first as a dancer and then as a pair of legs at an answering service switchboard, seemed to suggest her difficulties in overcoming the insecurities of projecting characters who are somehow not supposed to be yourself, but reflect your own perception of self even as you bring them to life. This seemed to be her battle throughout her career, and much of her career seemed to go out of its way to make the similarities obvious.

I didn't write about how big an influence she was in the Dick Van Dyke Show. Kids my age had crushes on her, moving beyond the women we wish were our moms, like Donna Reed or Loretta Young, to her being the epitome of allure in that early 60s Jackie Kennedy way. There is something to be written about the relative nerdiness/powerlessness of the men in those early 60s sitcoms; where the 50s husband/fathers were relative inert, but strong presences, Rob Petrie and his equivalents (think Bewitched, I Dream Of Jeannie, Green Acres) were males whose inert Father Knows Best presence was crossed with the bit of Ricky Ricardo when faced with the anarchic chaos of Lucy. This was something Mad Men captured pretty well, along with the other side of the coin, which was the men you'd find in a John D MacDonald novel.

Just as importantly, she was someone the female audience identified with. Originally, she was a hoofer learning comedy; Dick Van Dyke was glowing this morning on the radio explaining what a quick study she was as a comedienne, but it was always fun to watch them dance together, or do slapstick with an easy fitting brilliance. But as Mary Richards she was just the kind of hesitant, insecure, struggling woman to whom the middle-American audience could relate. She was the Catholic school girl in the midst of New York Jewish comedy (even when set in Minneapolis) and she played brilliantly off Ed Asner, Valerie Harper, Gavin MacLeod and the rest, and was especially good cutting the even-more-brittle fragile-ego'd Ted Baxter down to size.

When Mary Tyler Moore said 'I play me' she wasn't lying. I mention her exceptional performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in the TV mini-series (Sam Waterson was Lincoln);it was exactly the role she had played with such emotional impact in Ordinary People eight years earlier. It's also interesting to see the close parallel with Sally Field's interpretation in Spielberg's Lincoln, Field being another who often seems to be playing herself (think back to her needy Oscar speech).

In British terms her biggest impact might have been through MTM Enterprises, but that was primarily Grant Tinker's baby, and the parallel with her life is again a strong one. But were there no Hill Street Blues, there would have been no The Bill in Britain; without St. Elsewhere there would never have been a Casualty.

We often discount celebrities when they take to the confessional mode, and I have to admit feeling sadness every time I looked at her face seemingly ravaged by cosmetic surgeries. But that reminded me how Mary Tyler Moore was hard to dismiss, precisely because of how visibly difficult the process was for her. She had been an aspirational figure to American women for two decades in the 60s and 70s, she then became an inspirational one for two decades later. That is no mean feat.

LINCOLN, PART II: THE MOVIES AND THE FACTS

Historical accuracy was the big issue surrounding this year's Oscars; would that it dominated the national discourse on any more meaningful level. I've never really understood why the words 'based on a true story' carry such value for filmmakers, whether the audience really does feel more compelled by a story because it's true, or whether perhaps it makes it easier for them to suspend their disbelief. The problem with the debate over factuality is a two-edged sword: we need to indulge artistic license, but we also need to understand misrepresentation, when said distortion has a point. Otherwise we wind up like the Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, who told his audience he was glad his personal pick for best picture, Argo, had won the Oscar. He wrote the following: 'yes, it was partially historically inaccurate, all those Hollywood historical re-enactments are. But it was a rollicking good time with some education thrown in at the same time'. Awkwardly expressed as it is, the point might be said to encapsulate America now: yes it's inaccurate, but it's educational!

The main controversy, of course, concerned Zero Dark Thirty, in large part because it did indeed claim to be factual, based on classified documents provided by the CIA, the sort of things other people get sent to prison for doing. This was important because the film wound up being judged in large part on its moral position about torture, a position staked out without leaving much wiggle room because of its conclusion, against the run of fact as established by the CIA itself, that torture in this case accomplished its goal, namely killing Osama Bin Laden. It's possible the CIA lied about the efficacy of torture in this instance, but having admitted they do torture, why would they? And since the film is basically constructed as a saga of justice or revenge for 9/11 and (also inaccurately) 7/7, these points argue against its being taken as educational.

Argo, meanwhile, turned one aspect of the escape of Americans marooned in Tehran following the fall of the US Embassy into a CIA thriller. There was some criticism of the way the filmmakers downplayed the role of the Canadians in facilitating the escape—the issue of passports and air tickets was handed by the Canadians, not the CIA, with no dramatic hitches—and of course turned the exit from the airport into a chase scene, with Iranians apparently firing on a passenger aircraft (without the pilot being aware) but still giving the plane clearance to take off. The CIA's creation of a movie as cover for the exit makes for a more entertaining film than the 1981 TV movie Escape From Iran, written by my friend Josh Chetwynd's father Lionel, which basically lays out the way things happened on the ground, without the CIA, so you can understand Ben Affleck's need for some dramatic license. But Argo also gratuitously blames the British and New Zealanders for turning the escapees away, when in reality the Brits took them in and the Kiwis transferred them to the Canadians, where it was thought, as Americans, they would blend in better. Now there's an historical assumption that requires some consideration.

Lincoln never states 'based on a true story', but the screenplay was based, in part, on Doris Kearns Goodwin's excellent Team Of Rivals. This in itself is fascinating, because the story of the passage of the 13^th Amendment, the focus of the film, accounts for exactly four of the 900-odd pages in Goodwin's book. Thaddeus Stevens receives only four mentions in the entire book. Furthermore, the film is set after the period in which you might best consider Lincoln's cabinet a true 'team of rivals'. By 1864 he had already begun weeding dissent out of the cabinet, as the film points out with Hal Holbrook's Preston Blair, whose son Montgomery's resignation as Postmaster General Lincoln had demanded not long before. What the screenplay seems to have borrowed more is the general tenor of Lincoln's political nous, his demeanour, his stories and lines, and an even more general portrayal of those around him: Seward, Stanton, and Wells in particular.

Perhaps this was to create a sort of imprimatur for the film. But the reality is that few questioned the film's veracity, apart from things like the idea of a 19^th century president having pierced ears, like some 18^th century pirate (or 20^th century actor) or a bust of Woodrow Wilson decorating 1865 Washington. But one scene, the start of the House roll-call vote on the 13^th amendment, did create a small controversy. The roll call begins with Connecticut, and two representatives, given fictional names, vote 'no', sending up shockwaves round the House. And around Connecticut as well, after congressman Joe Courtney pointed out that Connecticut's four representatives all voted FOR the amendment. He didn't feel the need to point out to the filmmakers that since California was also a state, Connecticut would not have started any alphabetical listing anyway.

Courtney was accused of trying to influence votes to Argo, which made little sense, and screenwriter Tony Kushner explained he was simply using artistic license to build suspense. For a vote whose result the audience, at least those aware this was based on a true story, already knew. Kushner also wanted to show northerners opposed to the bill. And later, when a local historian pointed out that Connecticut was a state  divided almost evenly over the race issue, and relatively slow to ratify the amendment in the state legislature, the change was said to portray a broader kind of truth.

In fact the added dramatic effect is minimal.Indeed,one of Connecticut's four congressmen, English from New Haven, was a Democrat, so simply showing his yes vote might have provided as much, or even more, drama. The haphazard way the rest of the roll call is portrayed in the film, trying to stretch suspense down to the last vote, while focussing on those Congressmen we've already followed, means historical accuracy isn't crucial to the filmmakers. And it's hard to argue suspense is intensified by the filmmakers cutting to Mrs. Lincoln's cheat sheet tabulating the votes, which intensifies only our feeling they assume their audience are morons. But the change of Connecticut, like Argo's equally gratuitous throwaway diss of the Kiwis and Brits, appears in the end just meaningless indulgence.

Because the film adheres rather closely to real people, and even the way those people looked, it's odd they'd all of a sudden use fictional characters to express a position they could easily have found real people from the North to represent. For example, there were enough no votes from New York, which was, last time I looked, a 'Northern' state. And in fact, there was only one, from Maine, among the six New England states. So why not show New York? Well, the film-makers said they wanted to go in alphabetical order. So why not start, as noted, with the state which actually came first in alphabetical order? In fact, California's three congressmen all voted yes as well, so it would have been no worse than changing the Connecticut vote.

Could it be because California is Steven Spielberg's state, and California is the state in which Hollywood is located and the filmmakers didn't want to show their state in a bad light, even retrospectively? Why not use New York? Could it be because that is Tony Kushner's home state, and the state where the money behind the industry lies, and the filmmakers didn't want to show New York in a bad light, even retrospectively, and even if it were true? In fact, the movie at one point mentions Tammany Hall, but makes very little of the fact that Secretary of State William Seward was from New York, his career made by Thurlow Weed, the Republican boss of the state (as opposed to the Tammany-controlled city) and Weed was a source of laundered funds for campaigning in Connecticut, precisely because the state was so divided. If the film might be said to have a serious political flaw here, it may be that it plays the vote-bribing for fun, when in reality the politics of the time was immensely corrupt on a serious level, though in fairness James Spader's Bilbo does announce the prices at which congressmen are available. Not much has changed since then, because they still, as Lincoln remarks, sell themselves cheap.

Thaddeus Stevens' relationship with his housekeeper Lydia Smith (played by S. Epatha Merkerson) raises some questions of 'anachro-correctness' that I mentioned in part I of this essay. The reveal of their conjugal state may have surprised people; it's not an historical fact, but it was the subject of much gossip at the time. That Stevens did not leave her his house, but did leave enough money for her to buy it, and that his family would sell it to her, would argue for a special relationship, but we do tend to define such things in terms of 21^st century sexual politics. Some modern scholars believe Smith to have been a lesbian, on the grounds of her activities in women's groups in Washington—something Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's seamstress and perhaps confidant, did with her. Smith also patterned herself on Mrs. Lincoln; by this logic my mother was a lesbian obsessed with Jackie Kennedy. It was argued to me that Ms. Smith and Keckley weren't 'sitting around waiting for Lincoln to do something'. Which also doesn't make them lesbians.

But it leads to the most serious concern raised about the film, and that is its portrayal of the role of black people in the efforts to abolish slavery, and the criticism that more is not made of their positive actions. This follows much modern historical research showing the efforts black people made to bring about their own freedom, and it was a major part of the re-evaluation exhibited in the Ken Burns's Civil War documentary—a strand of argument sometimes overlooked beneath the honeyed traditionalism of Shelby Foote. This was a follow up to the earlier, crucial change in the historical consensus, putting slavery back as the primary cause of the war—not 'states rights' or 'economic difference' or anything else. Slavery was the root of the divide between North and South and it became inarguable to think otherwise.

However, that does not mean the abolition of slavery was the reason Northerners fought in or supported the war. Indeed, Lincoln sold the war as a mission to keep the Union together until such time as he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation and then fight for the Thirteenth Amendment. This is explained pretty clearly in the film. And yes it is explained largely from the political point of view of the men involved because, firstly, the movie is called Lincoln, not Slavery, secondly, the reality is that these men were in the arena where the legal changes to governance were made, and thirdly, blacks were not a voting block that influenced these men. The movie is the story of persuading white men to vote to free the slaves, and the question of those slaves' ultimate equality is not at that point fully settled, a point the film makes bluntly, and which history has made with even more bluntness.I thought the similar criticism better-founded when it was made of Spielberg's Amistad, which swiftly became the story of John Quincy Adams, but that is not the case here.

Much was made of the failure of figures like Frederick Douglass to appear in the film, and indeed, in Goodwin's book there is a fine moment when Douglass finally gets in to the celebration party after Lincoln's second inaugural, and the President makes clear his importance. His stand in, perhaps, is Mrs Keckley, and perhaps Gloria Reuben's performance is the litmus test for feelings on this matter—is she a passive character, 'waiting' for Lincoln, or does she express herself actively, within the context and constraints of the times? Indeed, I wondered at her presence in the House gallery, not least because later in the film, when black people are welcomed into that gallery to watch the vote, it is hailed as 'the first time'. I'm not sure more would be gained by seeing her and Mrs Smith attending meetings. Look closely and you'll see blacks at Lincoln's inauguration, celebrating in the streets, and, most importantly, in the war. The presence of black soldiers fighting for their own freedom is constant throughout the film, and when the Confederate peace delegation arrives in Union territory, their escort is made up of black trooopers. This is a key emotional moment, and for me says more about the efforts of individuals than the presence of Douglass might have.

This is not a question of historical accuracy as much as historical interpretation; you can believe the story of the passage of the Amendment, the arguments within Congress, and its relation to the ending of the war cannot be told without more obvious reference to the efforts of black leaders, but it's hard to argue those stories aren't conveyed with reasonable accuracy without each story. It's like the question of using the word 'nigger', one which I'm sure we will get to when I write about Django Unchained—it would be nice if we could eliminate it from some aspects of modern usage, but it's hard to convey the hatefulness of the word, and the horror of the times, without showing the times as they were. Lincoln, apart from the strangeness of tampering with my own state's history, strikes a pretty decent historical balance overall. I compared Spielberg to John Ford in Part I of this essay—and here he seems to have tried to, as the book did, catch the legend by getting at the essence of the fact.

LINCOLN: PART I I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH CONTINUES WITH THE REVIEW

NOTE: This is the first of a two-part essay. The second part, dealing with issues of fact and depiction of history, will appear here soon.

When I saw the trailer for Lincoln, my immediate thought was that I was watching the animatronic President Lincoln I saw at Disneyland in Anaheim, and since Steven Spielberg is, as I have pointed out before, very much in the mold of the 1950s Disney movies he grew up watching, I was expecting a worthy, if not wooden, film, portraying a worthy if not wooden President. The fact is, although Lincoln is indeed worthy, it is very much not wooden. It does begin, however, as if determined to present that animatronic Lincoln, a robotic figure who sits and listens to a lecture from a black soldier, whose argument about equality is virtually the only time in the film a speech makes no effort to sound like the 19^th century. It thought of a similar argument over soldiers' pay in Glory, which made less effort to sound period, but managed to convey the point in more period fashion. Then two boys from Gettysburg start reciting the Address, which is finished by the black soldier. Although it's moving, it does not ring true, indeed it smacks of what I'd call 'anachro-correctness', the desire to give characters in the past the attitudes of the present. With Spielberg, this instinct has manifested itself in hammer-heavy codas to films like Saving Private Ryan, trying to drive the point home to the contemporary audience. Fortunately for the film, and the audience, this approach ceases with that scene, and there is no coda. The other important thing in this scene, however, is the way the two Gettysburg boys are presented as just that, boys. They are kids with their idol, and as such they are stand-ins for us, in the Speilberg universe.

Within the framework of that universe, however, Lincoln makes a strong effort at presenting a nuanced political argument about Lincoln's battle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning slavery. Although it's passed the Senate, it has failed once already in the House of Representatives, where he has only a small majority, and Constitutional Amendments require a two-thirds vote. Besides trying to end a war and put the nation back together, Lincoln is also trying to keep his family together; his wife Mary still mourns the loss of their middle son; she ignores the youngest, and dotes on their oldest, who now wants to quit Harvard and join the Army. Keeping families together has always been a centerpiece of Spielberg's films.

The intimate story parallels the first, with Lincoln in a dilemma of principle regarding the war, and another about how to raise his eldest son. The film does well dealing with the nuances of Lincoln's bigger battles: he does not want to wait for the bigger majority he would have when the new House, swept in with his re-election in 1864, comes to Washington. He worries that moves to peace would lessen the cause of anti-slavery, concessions could be made to the South to end the war and even reform the Union, and he knows a bill passed by this more balanced House would carry more weight with the public, as well as sending a message to the South about the impossibility of a negotiated settlement as opposed to a surrender. But Lincoln needs to placate both wings of his own Republican party, the radical abolitionists and those, particularly from Border states, looking for peace. Meanwhile, he needs Democratic votes as well. And he knows he has not won the hearts and minds of the voters on the issue of racial equality.

I found this part of the story engrossing, perhaps because I know the background; it was accused by many of being 'boring' and slowing down the film. But if it isn't totally successful, it's more because it can't decide whether it's trying to be The West Wing or Advise And Consent, and so winds up being neither. But what it actually does is use the space between those modes, and use its parallel stories, to tell the story of Lincoln's whole career through the microcosm of this one political battle. Thus it can't be West Wing because there is no back-chat to speak of; there is only one story, Lincoln's, and the literal pursuit of wavering votes, by bribery or whatever means, is played more for comedy than anything else. Tommy Lee Jones, as the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who was the most powerful man in the House, is less a foil for Lincoln than a counter-balance; a true-believer who needs to learn Lincoln's style of accommodation. The actual political in-fighting is portrayed more through the chaos of the House chamber, and that much is done well, but the real meat of the story is when it comes down to Lincoln with his adversaries, where his full arsenal of persuasion and intimidation is brought into play. In fact the most powerful moment in the film may be when Lincoln slams his fists on a table and elucidates his power. But this placing of Lincoln in the centre of everything (except Stevens' own dilemma) means that, apart from highlights of debates, the real political infighting must be in the background.

At home, we often see Lincoln in shadows, as a silhouette, a gossamer figure behind curtains. The most truly Spielberg moment comes when Lincoln finds his youngest son Tad asleep in front of the fire, tin soldiers spread across a War Department map. It's shot from the child's eye, gazing way up at Lincoln, before Lincoln drops down to Tad's level on the floor. It again places the audience into the position of the child. This is the constant strain in Spielberg's work, between the childlike audience point of view, and the serious, usually masculine work at hand in the films. It's why the soldiers together on the march bits of Private Ryan didn't work at all; it's hard for him to do male bonding on an equal basis, whereas he can show the excitement and indeed horror of battle deftly. And that's why Lincoln's political machinations don't measure up to, for example, Advise and Consent, because we're not watching equals at play.

I've written before that the film-maker Spielberg most resembles is Robert Stevenson, best-remembered today for Jane Eyre and a series of Disney comedies in the Sixties, but who hit his Disney peak with Old Yeller and Johnny Tremaine in 1957 (for purposes of this film it might be interesting to revisit Stevenson's Thirties version of King Solomon's Mines, with Paul Robeson in a key role excised from later versions). Disney's 50s, with films like the above and TV series like Davy Crockett or Swamp Fox, were all about 'printing the legend' and telling history as adventure, from a child's point of view, but with an adult story line. It's also crucial that Lincoln's most direct approach to the issue of slavery itself comes with Tad looking at photographs of slaves, which leads him to ask the black people he knows about it, and thus give the audience reassurance that slavery was indeed wrong, and horrible.This elementary 'Disney' approach means Spielberg can play on Lincoln's legend while deconstructing, as it were, the man himself. With Lincoln, I think Spielberg is appropriating John Ford, and not just because Daniel Day-Lewis' performance is far closer to Henry Fonda's in Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln than, say, to Raymond Massey's (who also played John Brown—an interesting daily double of lead roles). And it's the performance by Lewis that defines the film, and it is a remarkable one.

Lewis inhabits the character physically, his gait and posture telling us all we need to know about the strain he is under. Although his voice at times seems to hint at Walter Brennan in the Thirties, it strikes the key of authenticity not only in time but in terms of the man himself. It lacks bombast, but is full of conviction, it is the voice of persuasion, of self-deprecation; this is the Lincoln as he was portrayed in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team Of Rivals (of which more in part II) who so inspired Barack Obama. And it can never resist humour, especially when used tactically. Few of the rest of the cast are given huge moments, apart from Jones and Sally Field as Mrs Lincoln. Field's too old, just as Lewis is too young, for their roles, and it creates some awkward moments; you get the sense that Fields imbues the character with a bit too much of her own patented hysteria, but she is strikingly effective. David Strathairn seems also to inhabit Secretary of State Seward, relegated to a literally supporting role. There are excellent cameos by Waylon Goggins, as a bribed Democrat, and Jackie Earle Haley as Confederate Vice President Stephens, but in general the cast puts on their whiskers or ties up their bustles and is convincing.

Jones' role is the most problematic. It is significant that he is presented in two 'reveals', introduced by the device of seeing the Congressmen reporting to him, and then, at the end, having his 'housekeeper' revealed to be in bed with him, as a spouse. He gets the biggest decision moment, when he has to speak about equality, and his equivocation is a thing of brilliance—the one moment when the film achieves its synthesis of West Wing and Advise and Consent. Beyond that, however, his iron control over his half of the House is expressed mostly in elaborate putdowns. The House vote itself is presented with score-keeping as clunky as anything I've seen since the makers of Red Dragon decided Hannibal Lecter would need to translate 'ris de veau' in his cookbook for the benefit of the audience, and the misrepresentation in the opening of the roll call is something I will discuss in part II of this essay.

I mentioned at the start that I feared an animatronic Lincoln, and I feared a Spielberg coda that would drive home his point. As the movie reaches the end, we come close. Lee's surrender at Appomattox presents us with our second animatronic moment: when Jarred Harris' rather too clean Grant doffs his hat, and Lee creakingly replies in kind. But it passes quickly. We see Robert Lincoln in uniform as part of Grant's staff—he looks remarkably like his little brother's soldier suit, and I wondered if, in the middle of the horror, Spielberg was still making a point, as with Tad and his war games in front of the fire, about war being a child's thing. And then, when Lincoln is shot, Spielberg chooses to give us the news while Tad is at another theatre. This is true, but I'm sure part of the reason was to wrong-foot the audience, who were probably expecting John Wilkes Booth and 'sic semper tyrannus'.

But to me it was crucial the play Tad Lincoln saw that night was Aladdin...and Spielberg ends us with a child's moment, a fairy story, interrupted by a nightmare of losing a parent. It is a purely Spielberg reaction—and, in a movie that doesn't really 'print the legend', brings it back to that 1950s moment. As an historical epic I like it better than Private Ryan or Schindler's List. This year's Oscar nominees were better, as a group, than last year's, but I still struggle to find one that jumps out as 'best' or 'great'. It may be simply the academy is tired of the elegaic, the John Williams' score's borrowing from Copland and Ken Burns's documentary. It might be that Lincoln didn't win best film because it was up against films approaching, to some extent, our present condition—and although I kept seeing hints of the Tea Party, and hints about our continuing racial divide, I think it lived up to its forecast of worthiness, and kept away from controversy. Which might have made it more relevant, but would have made it less Spielberg.

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.