With anti-American protests erupting across the Middle East and loose talk about war with Iran, many Americans find themselves asking “how did it get this bad?” Astonishingly enough, one of the first attempts to answer those questions comes from Hollywood.

Actor, producer and director Ben Affleck’s new film Argo takes viewers back to revolutionary Iran and the early days of the Iran hostage crisis.  Based on a true story taken from files declassified by President Clinton in 1997, the movie delivers its hostage-rescue story as realistically as possible, sparing American audiences from no uncomfortable truths.  Argo opens with a storyboard and video clips detailing the various regime changes Iran underwent in the mid-19th century, the worst of which resulted either directly or indirectly from American intervention.

The film itself follows a CIA mission to extradite six diplomats turned fugitives in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamist revolution.  Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, an intelligence consultant who dreams up an elaborate scheme to get the half-dozen embassy workers out of the country before the Ayatollah’s government discovers them.  The scheme: make a fake movie, and smuggle the diplomats out as a Canadian film crew.

It’s an old plot device, but it works.  The movie itself focuses more on the people involved than on the methodology used for their escape.  On top of that, Affleck shows here that he can create suspense worthy of Hitchcock without all the trappings of most modern action films.  The plan, in fact, goes off almost without a hitch, which would be boring if the filmmakers had not made the consequences of capture abundantly clear.  Of course, the viewer knows from the start that the heroes were not captured, but somehow that is forgotten whenever the camera pans to see another corpse hanging from a construction crane.  Fortunately, my fingernails were spared by the comedy of the film-within-a-film, which is hysterically bad and co-produced by wisecrackers John Chambers and Lester Siegel (conveniently the spitting images of John Goodman and Alan Arkin).

Even if Argo was not a great movie, I’d still recommend it for its unnervingly accurate historical context.  Free from the propagandism that usually plagues the spy-movie genre, Argo demands that its viewers take a second look at what they think they know about the Middle East’s past and present as well as our own.  In these days of transition, it’s important to look at the past and see where we’re coming from.