Ben Affleck plays a legendary “Latino James Bond”…in a movie that probably wouldn’t have been made with anybody else in the lead role.
The reviews for Argo, the new spy thriller directed by and starring Ben Affleck, have been ridiculously good. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a nearly unheard-of 94% positive rating; most of the critics agree with the Hollywood Reporter in calling it a “crackerjack political thriller told with intelligence, great period detail and a surprising amount of nutty humor.”
And almost nobody’s talking about how Ben Affleck is an extremely white guy playing a Latino–the real, live author of the real, live ‘exfiltration agent’ named Tony Mendez.
Here’s a picture of Tony Mendez and a picture of Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez.
Affleck isn’t doing anything silly like affecting a Latino accent or speaking Spanish; in fact, since he’s a real-life secret agent, very little is known about Mendez himself, so just how ‘realistic’ Affleck’s portrayal might be is purely a matter for speculation (though Affleck and his producer did speak with Mendez repeatedly as they developed the project). And no one is accusing Affleck of pandering to the Latino audience with this film–it is, in fact, a pretty straightforward thriller that has more in common with The Bourne Identity than it has with A Better Life. There isn’t so much as a whiff of racism around the movie, institutional or otherwise.
The real question is: as difficult as it is to see a non-Latino in the role, could the movie about a superspy named “Mendez” have gotten made at all…unless Affleck had purchased the rights and attached himself as director and star?
The sad answer is…probably not.
We’ll never know for sure, of course. There’s a bit of an online game going on about “What Latino actor could have played Mendez” which is actually kind of fun; you can catch a few of the exchanges here, in a forum on imdb.com. John Leguizamo gets mentioned a lot; so does Benicio del Toro and even Danny Pino. Javier Bardem is on the short list, too, but then he’s already in a big-time spy-fi thriller this year, as the bad guy in the new James Bond thriller, Skyfall.
And the movie getting made at all was not exactly a slam-dunk. Argo’s plot is strange, to say the least: it’s about a CIA “exfiltration agent” who hatches a mad scheme to rescue stranded Americans in Iran by impersonating the film crew of a “B” movie that doesn’t actually exist. Not exactly a mainstream concept, and not one that’s borne out of an existing franchise like James Bond or Mission: Impossible. If anyone but Ben Affleck, coming of a solid hit like The Town and critical favorite Gone Baby Gone, had pitched it to a major studio–with or without a Latino star attached–its chances of getting made would have been significantly lower. Affleck, in fact, may be the only reason that story ever got told outside of a lengthy magazine article some years ago. Consequently: Affleck is Mendez.
Still…could he have just directed the picture and picked a real Latino to play Mendez? Or more to the point, would a big-time studio allow a big-time box office start to stay behind the camera, in favor of a lesser-known (if more historically accurate) Latino out front? We may be looking at a behind-the-scenes story that’s less about racism than it is about playing it safe in Hollywood these days, where the famous get famous-er and nobody takes chances.
In any event, as the film goes wide and gets even more good buzz, a couple things seem certain: Argo is a pretty good movie with a lot of fans already…and any way you slice it, there’s little to no actual Latino component involved, in front or behind the camera, regardless of the facts behind the film.
It just happened to be a Latino. He just rescued all those people with a bold and dangerous plan that no one else would even consider.
That’s all.
