"Lincoln," "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty" are undeniably deserving of their nominations on aesthetic, narrative and technical grounds. Each was on my Top Ten list for 2012, with "Zero Dark Thirty" taking top honors. Each tells an engrossing, superbly crafted story that plunges viewers into otherwise opaque and unknowable worlds, made distant by time, secrecy or both.
But what should gratify Washington-area filmgoers most about these slices of D.C. history is that they're not just set here, but that they so enthusiastically celebrate institutions more often mired in dysfunction and public malodor.
What delicious irony that "Lincoln," which featured a galvanizing title performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, should pay homage to presidential politicking and legislative sausage-making precisely at a time when, back in 21st century real life, Congress is polling lower in popularity than head lice and Nickelback.
The very gamesmanship and posturing that bring modern-day citizens to despair about the system are played for affectionate chuckles in "Lincoln," with the great man himself engaging in shrewd horse-trading for votes and enlisting colorfully scurrilous pols to make patronage deals (always preserving White House deniability). As a tick-tock of how idealism and realpolitik can intersect with edifying results, "Lincoln" suggests that there's hope for democracy even in spite of its pettier angels — or, at least, that today's hyperpartisanship, discord and gridlock may one day be considered Oscar-worthy.
Just as improbable as a feel-good movie about Congress might be a good-guy movie about the CIA in 1970s Iran — where just two decades earlier the agency helped to orchestrate the removal of the country's democratically elected president, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
That event is depicted in a smart prologue to "Argo," which dramatizes a long-classified case wherein CIA operative Tony Mendez dreamed up a scheme to rescue a group of American diplomats who escaped the U.S. Embassy when it was stormed by Islamic revolutionaries in 1979, but who were subsequently trapped in the home of the Canadian ambassador in Tehran.
For Baby Boomers and others used to thinking of the CIA, if not as the bad guys, then at least as the not-always-very-good guys, Affleck's alternately tense and mordantly funny adventure offers a far more flattering portrait: that unfortunate Mosaddegh business is swiftly forgotten as we watch Mendez (played by Affleck himself) meet with his colleagues at Langley, huddle with Hollywood producers to dream up a fake movie to shoot, and use cunning, creativity and impressive showbiz chops to spirit his charges out of Iran without so much as a coup d'etat.
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