Adapted from the book The Master of Disguise by Antonio J Mendez and Malcolm McConnell
CIA agent Tony Mendez helps six Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis by pretending they are part of a Canadian film crew on a location scout.
Tony Mendez's book is a relatively comprehensive account of most of his life, and as much of his career in the CIA as he was authorized to disclose. Consequently, only one of its ten chapters focuses on the Argo mission. I'm not sad that I read the whole book because it was fascinating, but that also makes this an unusual adaptation to analyze, since the movie focused solely on Argo. The aspects of Mendez's life outside of the mission that are shown in the film are mostly very different from what was described in the book. The movie gives him only one son and has him separated from his wife, while according to the book, he actually had three children and had a relatively good relationship with his wife, despite his work often separating them.
The changes to the mission itself and how it transpired are similar to the changes to Mendez's personal life: they make the movie far more dramatic. The actual real-life mission, at least as described in the book, was already very high-stakes, but the movie adds several instances of them almost getting caught to drastically increase the tension. Ordinarily, this would bother me, but I think the movie does it so well that I can't really fault it. In a way, it's very meta for a movie about how fake the movie industry is to have dramatically exaggerated the true story it's based on. Whether or not this was intentional, I enjoy this aspect.
There was really only one change that I didn't quite understand: the movie chose not to show any sort of disguise being used to help them escape. Most of Tony Mendez's career in the CIA was spent working on revolutionary new physical disguise techniques, which was the main reason he went on this mission in the first place. The book talks about how some of the people he was helping escape were relatively well-known diplomats who could be easily recognized, so he had to alter their appearances to help them escape. The movie did not disguise them at all, which I guess also added to the tension because there was a greater likelihood of them being stopped, but it would have been nice to see a little bit of his disguise work reflected in the film after reading a whole book about it. The book also mentions another CIA agent who was also there helping them escape, and he doesn't make it into the movie at all. I'm not sure whether this had to do with either the CIA or that other person himself not wanting to draw attention to him, or if the movie just wanted to focus on one major hero, but that was just something else I noticed.
I just read over my Best Picture post for Argo and apparently at the time I felt the need to defend it from haters, whereas now I don't feel like people have very strong opinions about this movie one way or the other. That's one of the most interesting things about revisiting Oscar movies: the way a movie is perceived when it first comes out is often quite different from how it is perceived even just a few years later, let alone several decades later. So I feel like my analysis of earlier winners is always different than it would have been if I'd been watching the movies closer to when they came out.
Following this will be 12 Years a Slave, another Best Picture Winner based on a memoir, albeit a completely different type of story.
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