In “Zero Dark Thirty,” in contrast, torture is something that steady professionals do in quiet rooms, and that only cowardly politicians question. But there’s no mistake about the moral dilemma. agents in Langley electronically confirm the diplomats’ plane tickets in real life, the Ambassador’s wife paid for them herself. To take one instance, in a tense scene in the movie, C.I.A. (In fairness, the Tehran airport, in that period, was a scene of intense drama, with people pulled off planes, children interrogated, luggage ripped apart.) Another complaint is that the heroism of the Canadian diplomats isn’t credited enough, although, as Michelle Shephard, of the Toronto Star, points out, Affleck took some steps to address that by, for example, amending the film’s postscript. “Argo” does add a few more cliff-hanging moments than there were in reality-for example, cars screeching after the diplomats’ SwissAir flight as it’s about to take off. The hatred in the streets, the way Iranian society had been deformed by a drive for revenge and score-settling, is openly attributed to torture. agents and American diplomats wonder what we’d been thinking when we decided to support a torturer, and why we were still protecting him-he had fled to the United States for medical treatment, and the Iranians wanted him back. (Because this comic book is less cartoonish than “Zero Dark Thirty,” it is also nuanced enough to mention that traditionalists weren’t happy with the opportunities afforded to women under the Shah.) Several times in the movie, both hardened C.I.A. In a prologue framed as comic-book panels, a narrator explains American complicity in a coup that overthrew an elected government, our support for the Shah, his decadence, and the torture perpetrated by his secret police, which Iranians came to associate with Americans.
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agent helped get them out by pretending that they were the crew for a science-fiction movie.īut “Argo” is also a movie about torture: more precisely, about the price of tolerating and abetting it. (So was Tom Hooper, the director of “Les Misérables.”) “Argo,” set in Iran during the hostage crisis, is based on the story of how six Americans at the embassy managed to slip away while the compound was being stormed, how Canadian diplomats hid them for months, and how a C.I.A. If torture had been the only standard, though, then Ben Affleck might have been nominated for best director for “Argo,” a film that is more self-consciously fictionalized, and yet in many ways more honest-but he was also on the list of snubs.