Ben Affleck’s Best Director snub for his Academy Award-winning film Argo is karmic for Canadians
Ben Affleck’s Argo was a taut, gripping, and frenetic political thriller that barrelled towards its cathartic dénouement with irresistible and centripetal force. The unrelenting pace, palpable tension, and impossibly deft editing is a testament to the collective craftsmanship behind the film and a personification of a director in top form.
But at the 85th Academy Awards, Affleck wasn’t even nominated in the Best Director category, recognition he surely and justifiably deserved. All of his hard work, sacrifices, and risk-taking were overlooked, marginalized, and ignored with a resounding wall of silence by the Academy. Affleck has every right to feel slighted, every right to feel robbed, insulted, and angered. Kilometres north of Hollywood, however, 33 million Canadians played an orchestra of small violins.
At this point, the factual inaccuracies of Argo have been well-documented. Based on the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution, the real hero of the stranger-than-fiction story was Canadian ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, who risked the lives of himself and his wife, as well as Canada’s national security and diplomatic relations with Iran, in order to take in six American strangers.
Did he do it out of empathy or North American nepotism? It doesn’t matter why, but Taylor did the right thing. In Argo, however, the role of Taylor was relegated to that of a glorified hotel doorman.
Instead, the film championed the efforts of Tony Mendez, a man who, according to the then US President Jimmy Carter, was only in Iran for one and a half days.
In fact, during an interview with CNN, Carter said, “Ninety per cent of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan [to rescue the hostages] was Canadian,” but Argo “gives almost full credit to the American CIA.” It should be no surprise that Taylor was not particularly chuffed.
In an interview with the Toronto Star, Taylor said, “In general, it makes it seem like the Canadians were just along for the ride. The Canadians were brave. Period.” He also agreed with Carter by saying, “[The rescue plan] was 90 per cent Canada, 10 per cent the CIA.”
Yet, as loudly as us polite Canadians could mutter and murmur in protest, the voices of those offended by our offense were even louder and more vociferous. “This is Hollywood, after all,” they said. Movies are about entertainment, not academic honesty. If Affleck wanted to be historically accurate, he’d make a documentary.
These sentiments are true, but ultimately specious, at least in regards to Argo. Any film that doesn’t want to be taken seriously as a historical document shouldn’t open up with a title card that says it was based on a true story. A film that does this has to show some fidelity to fact. “Inspired by true events?” Fine, but if you know your film is fictional, don’t put up a title card that suggests otherwise.
Speaking of title cards, the film, when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, had a postscript suggesting Taylor was given conciliatory credit and that the CIA let Canada take the glory for the operation.
Taylor, quite rightly, called it “disgraceful and insulting” and flew to Los Angeles to personally write a new postscript.
But Taylor’s effort amounts to merely a Band-Aid on a festering wound. Argo, even with its new postscript, is still a piece of rousing, if finely made, jingoistic propaganda. Movies matter, and what movies say matters just as much, if not more so. The very act of the world’s most prestigious and acclaimed awards show bestowing recognition to a film based on falsehood only strengthens and legitimizes the very falsehood it was founded on.
If all people ever see of the Iranian hostage crisis is what they see in Argo, then what they see in Argo is what they’ll believe. In a decade’s time, what will the public think of the fiction that is the film’s story?
Will they fact-check and research, or trust that Argo was “based on a true story?”
To his credit, Affleck and company were on stage to accept the award for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, but one would be naïve to think that a film as beautifully constructed as Argo could direct itself. Affleck did, and he deserves credit. But just the same, neither the CIA nor the American government went beyond the call of duty to save its own citizens during the Iranian hostage crisis. A brave group of Canadians did that.
Affleck has every right to complain about his snub from the Hollywood history books, as much we Canadians do, anyway. But our response to his resentment should and will be the very same attitude that Affleck originally had to ours. To pull a quote from the film itself, “Argo fuck yourself.”
Justin Li, Arts Editor
Ang Lee was awarded the Oscar for Best Director for his work in Life of Pi.
