Walter Salles‘ On The Road “is masterful and rich and lusty, meditative and sensual and adventurous and lamenting all at once. It has Bernardo Bertolucci‘s ‘nostalgia for the present’ except the present is 1949 to 1951 — it feels completely alive in that time. No hazy gauze, no bop nostalgia. Beautifully shot and cut, excitingly performed and deeply felt.

“It’s much, much better than I thought it would be given the long shoot and…I forget how long it’s been in post but it feels like ages. It’s so full of life and serene and mirthful in so many different ways. I was stirred and delighted and never less than fully engrossed as I watched it, and it’s great to finally run into a film that really hits it, and then hits it again and again.” — from a 5.23.12 Cannes Film Festival posting.

We gondola-ed down from the Argo screening at the top of the mountain, but it took a while and by the time we got to the Masons theatre, the 4:30 pm screening of Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers — one of the big buzz films so far — was sold out and locked down. So we sauntered over to a coffee cafe so I could write a little something about Argo.

Ben Affleck‘s period drama, set during the 1979 and ’80 Iran hostage crisis and based on fact, is a partly light-hearted, partly riveting drama about a kind of Mission Impossible scam about smuggling six American foreign-service workers who had taken shelter in Tehran’s Canadian embassy after the storming of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages.

An enterprising CIA guy named Tony Mendez (Affleck) devises a plan to hoodwink Iranian officials into believing that these six are filmmakers looking to use Iranian locations for a cheesy-sounding sci-fi film called Argo that is, of course, fake.

Argo starts out as a somber docu-drama, and then shifts into a kind of flip jocular vein (especially with the appearance of John Goodman and Alan Arkin as a couple of exploitation producers who assist Afleck in creating the backstory for the phony film), and then somber again and then sad and then revved again and then really, really tense.

In short, it’s smart and absorbing for first two-thirds to three-quarters, but it’s the suspenseful final act that brings it home.

Argo delivers superb period detail all the way through — technology, cars, clothes, haircuts, everything.

Affleck’s direction is clean and concise and doesn’t waste time or footage. The screenplay by Chris Terrio is aces. And the cast hits nothing but true notes — Affleck as Mendez, Bryan Cranston as his CIA boss, Arkin and Goodman as the producers, Victor Garber as Iran’s Canadian ambassador who protected the six when they were hiding in his residence, and Kyle Chandler as the late Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter‘s chief of staff.

Somebody tweeted “instant Best Picture contender!” after it was over. Really? Brilliantly suspenseful as the last act is, Argo, boiled down, is just a clever, well-jiggered caper film. Hats off but why does it have to be a Best Picture contender? A story well told and highly suspenseful, for sure, but there’s no thematic undertow, no metaphor tug — nothing more than “this is what really happened, and wasn’t it cool that the CIA pulled this off?” Yes, it was cool…but Best Picture contenders are about common chords and universality and shared emotional discovery, and that is not what Argo is up to.

Well, somewhat at the end because it’s nice to see a tough situation resolved through ingenuity and guts, but it’s not really a Best Picture contender for the ages. It’s a good, smart, satisfying adult thriller — why isn’t that enough?

My brief chat with Argo director-costar Ben Affleck at today’s Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch was mostly about Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, in which Affleck “stars,” so to speak. A friend who’s seen Malick’s film tells me Affleck has been all but cut out of it, just as Adrien Brody was edited out of Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Sean Penn‘s role was reduced to almost nothing in The Tree of Life.

In any event I asked Affleck if he’s seen To The Wonder and he said, “Yes, I’ve seen it”….(beat) (beat) (beat)…”and it makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers.” I didn’t take notes so the remainder of his comments are only approximately recalled, but he basically said it’s not a commercial film, that it’s the kind of thing that’s mainly for critics, and that when he’s directing a film “I’m always thinking about how to make this aspect completely clear and make this aspect understandable, and Malick doesn’t give a damn about any of that” and that his basic thing is to follow the butterfly, so to speak.

Jett and I are about to head up to the Chuck Jones theatre to see Argo, which Affleck will introduce, at 2 pm. He’ll be doing a q & a following tomorrow’s 1 pm screening.

At a dinner party last night I listened to the views of a hardcore Obama hater, an older woman who was otherwise perfectly agreeable. I say “hardcore” because she not only embraces the nonsensical view that we’re currently worse off than we were four years ago (when the country was teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe, caused entirely by a Republican-enabled Wall Street gangsta free-for-all), but she’s also a bit of a birther. Sorry, but I rarely come into first-hand contact with these people. They’re out there by the millions, I realize. I had to suppress the urge.

I’m staying at the home of producer Glenn Zoller in Telluride so I can’t complain, but my son Jett and I are staying in a large room with three bunk beds plus a 15-foot-high loft, and one of the worst snoring incidents of my life occured at 2 am. I’m hardly one to talk since I snore, I’m told, but I’m also a very deep sleeper — right at the bottom of the lake — and I was nonetheless awoken by some truly grotesque noises coming from one of the bunks.

It was like that howling satanic growl heard in the third act of The Exorcist. Something beastly, appalling…a human couldn’t be the source.

I’ve found that if you clap your hands and go “hey!” the snorer will shut up for a while, and that technique worked for a while this morning, but the snoring returned two or three minutes later. I finally had to grab the blankets and sheets and throw them down on the floor and climb down the loft ladder and trying sleeping on the couch in a nearby TV den. But between the aural trauma of the snoring and the thin mountain air I couldn’t get back to sleep for at least 90 minutes. Terrific.

Our most recent mass shooting happened early this morning in a Pathmark supermarket in Old Bridge, New Jersey. At least three dead, reportedly including the shooter, who may be an ex-Marine. If only a packing NRA member had been there.