By Seán Francis Condon
On Friday night, star and director Ben Affleck is reaping the adulation of the Toronto International Film Festival red-carpet crowd for the gala opening of Argo, his feature about the outlandish scheme between Canada and the United States to usher American diplomatic workers out of Iran in the heat of the 1980 hostage crisis.
Saturday morning, all of Canada awakens to front-page headlines of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cutting diplomatic ties with the Middle East hotspot and whisking away five of our country’s diplomats the previous dawn.
“I was in Tehran all last week lamenting the discontent,” Affleck jokes to reporters at a Saturday afternoon press conference. “Somebody who works for Warner Brothers came up to me and said ‘They closed the Canadian Embassy in Tehran’, and I kind of laughed. And they said ‘No. They closed the Canadian Embassy in Tehran.’
“And what was even more amazing about the piece – and, naturally, this had to do with accusations of the Iranians arming the al-Assad government in Syria – it reflected the long-standing tensions between Iran and Canada, which were reflected in this. We have this little piece where the Iranian Foreign Minister kind of threatens Canada towards the end of the movie. And it showed that, while the movie is 30 years old, it really is still relevant, both in the sense that it is about the unintended consequences of revolution, and the sense that were really dealing with exactly the same issues now that we were then. So, I was really struck by it.”
Argo is an account of the largely unknown and seemingly impossible mission of CIA specialist Tony Mendez, played by Affleck, who devised a plan to disguise Americans hiding out at the diplomatic home of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) as a Canadian film crew in the country for just two days to scout locations for a ridiculous science-fiction fantasy film. Working with a couple of Hollywood insiders – makeup specialist John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) – Mendez becomes a Tinseltown player, making all the necessary moves to build a convincing back story that will fool the Iranian militants keeping a tight guard on Tehran’s airport and the entire country.
At the time the real hideouts made their way back to the United States, the story was spread (as news clips in Argo from the likes of former Canadian External Affairs Minister Flora MacDonald bear out) that Taylor and the Canadian Embassy were solely responsible for the rescue. The reason for that cover story – which earned Taylor endless citations and nominations for years afterward – was to protect the 52 U.S. hostages being held in their embassy by Iranian insurgents. As Iran became hardline under the rule of returned Ayatollah Khomeini, the hostages were held under threat of death for 444 days, finally being released on the day of incoming U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on January 20, 1981.
Argo shows that Iran was up in arms over then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s harbouring of deposed Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had retained a lavish lifestyle while his subjects collapsed in poverty before his exile. The Shah eventually succumbed to cancer in July 1980.
“It was kind of a huge responsibility, because I did figure I would be judged harshly,” Garber, a Maritime native, notes about his role as Canadian hero of the time Taylor. “But once I got the glasses, I was fine. And it was my own hair.
“Seriously, I didn’t really know all that much because, at the time, I was living in New York and pursuing a career and too self-involved to really get to know what was going on. But when I read the script, I was so astonished by this man and what he did, and I thought it was beautifully written and beautifully depicted. So, I thought I had this responsibility and I was just thrilled to get a chance to do it.”
Given the limits of time and place in Hollywood moviemaking – some of the film was shot in Turkey, rather than taking the almost impossible risk of going to Iran – not everything is going to play out point-by-point.
“There’s a clearer line between documentaries, where you expect a stricter adherence to facts and truth and history, and our movie where we say ‘Based on a True Story,’” notes Affleck. “But because we say ‘Based on’ – and this is for lawyers – rather than ‘This is a True Story’, it’s understood that we’re allowed to take some dramatic licence. So, for example, at the beginning, the house guests went from Place A to Place B to Place C, and it would have been a lot of shoe leather. So, we kind of compressed it where they went straight to the Canadian Ambassador’s.
“You know, in terms of making a movie and sort of being truthful about it, I think there’s a spirit of truth, and there’s sort of really what happens. We got really lucky, because most of what happened in this movie is extremely compelling, and the characters were very interesting, so it made it fun and a pleasure. And I could actually rely on that. I’d have questions and say ‘I don’t know. Should it look this way or should it look that way?’ And we’d go ‘Well, how did it really look? Let’s look at the actual material.’ So, it was actually kind of a crutch to me.”
On Friday morning, Canada cut diplomatic ties with Iran, citing that country’s role in terrorist activity, the building of its nuclear program, and its support of the Assad regime in violence-torn Syria. Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Conference in Vladivostok, Russia, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called Iran “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.”
Along with the five Canadian diplomats removed from the country, Canada ordered the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from our country’s borders, giving them five days to leave. Great Britain closed its embassy in Tehran last November after it was stormed by protesters, and Canada has not formally had an ambassador in Iran since 2007, instead leaving business to a chargé d’affaires, a diplomatic stopgap in lieu of an ambassador.
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