As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev unwound last Friday, one of the most common anxious jokes I heard was that when it was all over over, Ben Affleck, who grew up in the Boston area and made his bones with movies like Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, and The Town was going to walk away with an armload of Academy Awards for whatever movie he inevitably makes about the Boston Marathon bombing—and bombers. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explain that it’s possible that Tsarnaev, who is recovering from serious injuries and has been indicted on charges of weapons of mass destruction use and malicious damage of property resulting in death, could try to hire an entertainment lawyer to negotiate the sale of his life rights, or to block a movie about him altogether:

Massachusetts is among many states these days that has a “right of publicity” law. This statute prevents unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s “name, portrait or picture.” Further, the law is described as similar to one enacted in New York, which is important because in a rather unprecedented move a few weeks ago, a New York judge temporarily blocked Lifetime Television from airing a movie about convicted killer Chris Porco after the subject sued. But the judge’s restraining order was stayed after Lifetime cried about the potential disaster to free speech.

For that reason, it’s almost guaranteed — although not totally because Massachusetts has no appellate case law on the topic — that Tsarnaev wouldn’t be able to stop any production company from making a movie about his life.

He makes clear that it would be hard for Tsarnaev to block a project entirely, or to guarantee that he got paid: courts have tended to side with filmmakers on free speech grounds, though some criminals and accused criminals have won the right to some compensation from projects that retell their stories. But the entire scenario raises uncomfortable questions about what it takes to lock down the rights to a good story in Hollywood. Would someone decide it’s worth it, even if it meant paying someone who is accused of killing and maiming dozens of people? And would they pay up if the money had to go to a compensation fund rather than to Tsarnaev himself, an arrangement that would be the equivalent of paying bombing survivors for their injuries, especially given the steep medical costs many of them are facing, and the fact that donations may not be enough to cover all of their needs? I hate the idea of seeing Tsarnaev get paid for the harm he’s caused the Boston area over the past two weeks. But as a moral exercise, I’m grimly curious what kind of price Hollywood would put on his story.

If there’s a movie that’s arrived in theaters aided more by the tailwinds of current events than Ben Affleck’s Argo, an espionage thriller about the Canadian caper, in which the Central Intelligence Agency faked a Hollywood movie production to spirit six Americans out of Iran after they slipped out of the embassy as it came under siege by hardline students. A handsome, sophisticated, if exceedingly overstuffed caper movie, Argo should also get credit for being exceptionally nuanced about America’s role in Iran. But ultimately, Argo has too much to handle to make its characters as engaging as its geopolitics, and even then, it falters in its willingness to treat its audience like intelligent adults.

In the introduction to Argo, Affleck, from a script by Chris Terrio, briskly introduces the issues at stake—Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, the American support of Shah Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian Revolution, the decision to give the Shah access to medical treatment in the United States, and rising tensions at the embassy—while drawing a clear line between those national policy decisions and the views of the people who would shortly be imprisoned there or in hiding in Canada’s embassy in Iran.”What do you expect? We let the guy torture and deball an entire nation,” one diplomat says of the crowd growing outside the embassy. “So great, we’ll take in any punk as long as he’s got cancer?” another complains of the Shah’s arrival in the U.S.

As it becomes clear that embassy security may be breached—in a frightening echo of recent events in Libya, two diplomats watch the crowds mass while wondering “The windows are supposed to be bullet-proof, right?” and reflect that they’ve “Never been tested.”—the people who will shortly become hostages show off an array of complicated emotions. Bob Anders (Tate Donovan) warns his staff about what will happen to the Iranians waiting in line “If they get caught applying for visas to the U.S.” The head of security warns his men “Don’t fucking shoot anybody. You don’t want to be the assholes who started a war.” They burn and shred documents, concerned for themselves and their country, however conflicted they feel about it.

But once the embassy has been taken and the six members of the staff have ensconced themselves with the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), the movie doesn’t have much more time to spend with them, exploring their ideas about what’s happening in the country where they once represented their own. “She begged for us to leave. She packed our bags. And I told her, just a little bit longer,” Mark (Christopher Denham) reflects of his wife’s concern for their safety prior to the takeover, which he tamped down in favor of trying to advance his foreign service career. But the movie is more concerned with the men trying to get them out of the country than their captivity.
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Over at IFC, Terri Schwartz reports that Ben Affleck’s been approached about directing DC’s Justice League movie, and has a smart assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in the position that also suggests a way DC, as it tries to build a viable movie franchise to match The Avengers, could distinguish itself from Marvel’s approach:

For now, we’re just intrigued by the possibility of Affleck. He has some experience with superhero films, but we’ll be the first to admit that “Daredevil” wasn’t great. Fortunately Affleck has greatly matured as an actor and a director since then, which is good for this project. However, Affleck doesn’t have any experience directing with CGI, which could be a boon or a curse. He filmed some great realistic action scenes in “The Town,” which could make a “Justice League” film more in line stylistically with Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy. To us, the more realistic this film is, the better, though we know there’s no way to make characters like the Green Lantern and the Flash work without some semblance of computer assistance. Hopefully Affleck is up to the task.

Mike Fleming at Deadline is more skeptical of the prospect that Affleck is going to happen:

This is a story I checked out days ago, and didn’t run when Affleck’s reps stated that it was not going to happen with him. Now, it makes sense that Warner Bros would offer Affleck the project. Chris Nolan is top man over there, but after three Batfilms and after producing the Superman reboot Man of Steel, he’s gotten spandex-clad protagonists out of his system. After Nolan, the studio then offers everything else to Harry Potter director David Yates (who is now keen on Tarzan) and Affleck, who has become a major director with Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the upcoming Argo. Just because the studio wants Affleck doesn’t mean he will do the movie, and several sources tell me he might take a meeting, but that’s it.

After putting his acting career in the dumper with questionable choices like Gigli, Affleck admirably scripted a second act for himself with his writing and directing skills, and did it by taking on unexpected, thoughtful films. His reps clearly denied he would take this, and why would he want to direct a Justice League movie, unless he himself had figured out a way to make one that would compare favorably with Joss Whedon’s billion dollar Marvel smash The Avengers? I don’t see it.

Whether or not Affleck ends up being the man to do it, I think that DC would be strategically and creatively smart to create a franchise that’s less cosmic and more realistic than Marvel’s, and that maintains at least the gloss of ideas from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Given that Whedon’s locked in for Avengers 2, it probably doesn’t make sense to get into an witty arms race with him. Similarly, Marvel is, I think, potentially going to test audiences’ tolerance for cosmic characters and conflicts with Guardians of the Galaxy, and DC could distinguish itself by grounding its conflicts in the real world, and potentially even in real issues. Even if I think the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were ultimately flimsy and inconsistent , they got people talking without getting in the way of the movies’ blockbuster status, and that’s not a terrible brand if you can find directors and writers who can walk that line intelligently. It may not be possible to do emotional connection and dialogue better than Whedon, but given the way The Avengers has been set up so far, I think it’s possible for DC to come off build a more grounded world that gets audiences to connect to the characters and conflicts in a more serious way. We’ll see whether that’s Zack Snyder’s actual approach in Man of Steel, but DC’s certainly selling the initial hero’s journey as deeply rooted in the American experience and landscape rather than foregrounding the cosmic elements of it.

I also think that a more grounded, naturalistic (in so much as these things can be naturalistic) approach to the DC Comics universe might be a smart hedge against the day that mass audiences get a little tired of superhero movies. If you don’t need to to use Skrull spaceships and giant space lizard fish in the climax of your action sequences, you can make excellent action movies on smaller budgets. In boom times, that can mean bigger profits. If trends slow, it can mean preserving a margin. I don’t really expect DC to think that strategically, given the general death of the mid-budget action picture. But the company needs some smart insight to distinguish itself if it wants to do more than tag after Marvel’s coattails.

I’ve felt for a while like Ben Affleck’s real promise was going to end up in directing rather than acting, and the first trailer for Argo, his movie about a C.I.A. operation to free some of the people being held hostage in Iran by pretending to film a science-fiction flick, confirms that suspicion:

I do wish Affleck had been able to resist playing the lead role, and not only because, as Arturo Garcia pointed out, the point man on the real Argo operation was Latino, not a white dude from Boston. But the rest of the cast is stacked, whether it’s Bryan Cranston playing a similar government honcho role to the one he had in Contagion, Alan Arkin and John Goodman as mischievous Hollywood players, or Tate Donovan and Clea Duvall as hostages. And a story that’s about the importance of narrative to real-world success is just catnip for me.

But I’m curious to see how Argo will portray ordinary Iranians. Will the movie acknowledge the U.S.’s role in restoring the Shah to power? What about the spectrum of public opinion in Iran at the time? One of the real virtues of a movie like Persepolis, the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs about growing up inside and beyond the borders of Iran, is that it’s a reminder that there’s a difference between a nation’s leadership and it’s people. Given that Argo‘s coming out at a time when American policy rhetoric around Iran has gotten heated, that’s a worthwhile thing to emphasize, and I hope the movie is smart enough to do that.

I’ve always liked the story about two boys who grew up in Boston, wrote a movie about a sensitive working-class genius, and won an Academy Award for it. After they won that prize, the boy who played the sensitive genius went on to play a bunch of quirky roles, while the guy who played his laborer pal tried to parlay his not insubstantial jaw into an action career. But overtime, something strange happened: the sensitive boy became a superstar when he started taking roles where he hit people very hard and shot them with great precision, while the boy with the jaw sort of flamed out, and then started reinventing himself as a thoughtful director of movies about his home town. In other words, I have hopes for Ben Affleck.

And I’m particularly interested to see him step away from Boston with his next project. Argo‘s interesting for a lot of reasons. A big prestige movie about the U.S.’s tetchy relationship with Iran in the 1970s and 1980s coming at this particular moment is bound to provoke comment, especially since this is a story about the CIA pretending they’re shooting a sci-fi movie as a ruse to get diplomats out of the American embassy during the hostage crisis (something that actually happened). Rather than being a story about how the U.S. used overwhelming force to impose its will on an enemy, it’s a story about the efficacy of American cleverness, it’s foreign policy as heist flick. The film adaptation of Charlie Wilson’s War did this to a certain extent, there was an element of getting the gang together in that assemblage of Congressman, Texan do-gooder, and CIA operative. But the line between Wilson’s actions and our current involvement in Afghanistan, and the moralism of Wilson’s conviction meant the movie could never quite swagger.

But there’s an interesting space for stories about people who do the weirdest work in government because they need to accomplish things that can’t happen through the normal practice of diplomacy, intelligence, or defense. I’m amazed, for example, that no one’s optioned Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, his book about the eccentric group of British spies who spent months cooking up a plan to plant false plans about the Allied invasion of Italy on the body of a dead man on the off chance the plans might get back to Hitler. The story is, as Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed out, a good case study for why intelligence operations might be more trouble than they’re worth. But it’s also a valuable illustration of the fact that in addition to the big heroic stories, the assault on Normandy, the conference at Yalta, there are all these messy little bits of any nation’s interests that can’t be wrapped up through conventional means and channels. They’re not the majority of our foreign policy, or our defense policy, whichever category you prefer to put them in, by any means.

But they’re there—spare diplomats and CIA contractors, cloistered terrorists and non-existent men—and they’re rich dramatic and comedic territory. We don’t have a lot of upliftingly eccentric public servants on our screens. If you’re off a bit, you’re depressing or dangerous, Bobby Goren or John Luther (and if you’re a woman, the most eccentricity you’re allowed is crankiness). Or perhaps more to the point, we don’t have genuinely innovative and creative public servants in our popular culture. Whimsy shades over so easily into wastefulness, and we’re used to a small set of mostly stolid ways for people to do their duty. I’m not saying all of our foreign policy movies should be about wacky hijinks. But there’s room for stories that tell us more about the limitations of conventional foreign policy tools, and that government is more than men in gray flannel suits.