Ben Affleck (2010)

Set in Charlestown, a neighbourhood of Boston:  according to figures on the screen at the start of The Town, the place is a world leader in armed robbery.  Boston certainly has claims to becoming a Hollywood crime capital in recent years – thanks to the likes of Mystic River, The Departed and Ben Affleck’s directing debut Gone Baby Gone (the best of those three) – but there are counter-claims on Wikipedia about the situation in the real world:  it’s suggested that gun crime in Charlestown isn’t statistically what it was in the 1990s.   The prevailing grimness and graphic violence of The Town shouldn’t be mistaken for believability.  The improbably extended exchanges of gunfire seem designed to establish the film’s generic rather than its realistic credentials and the screenplay (by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, from a 2005 novel by Chuck Hogan called Prince of Thieves) is clichéd.  This is the story of a criminal who wants to change his ways, of his love affair with a girl who can bring out the good in him, of scores to settle with an elderly gangster who’s ruined the protagonist’s father’s (and mother’s) life as well as dominated his own.   The Town is a reasonably exciting action picture but these clichés aren’t reanimated in any interesting way.  The film is, nevertheless, expressively photographed by Robert Elswit.  Charlestown looks mostly malignant but there’s one shot in particular, when night turns to dawn over Boston, which stays in the mind as poignantly ambiguous:  it’s both a new day and the clear light of day that exposes what’s been hidden under cover of darkness.

Doug MacRay and his three pals (they’re longstanding friends as well as partners in crime) rob a bank and take its young manager Claire Keesey hostage.  After she’s released, Doug starts following Claire and begins a relationship with her.  The basic plot is, in other words, highly improbable and the script doesn’t do anything to address or transcend its improbability.  It’s hard to believe that Claire wouldn’t be traumatised by the events at her bank and she’s remarkably incurious about Doug’s background.  When she does eventually discover the truth, she’s upset but still manages to absorb the shock in pretty short order and to continue to love Doug.  You begin to wonder if Claire is as lacking in normal human responses as Doug’s best friend Jem.  Rebecca Hall gives the part a good try but she has no chance of bringing any reality to the girl’s extraordinary situation and Affleck, a talented director, is a limited actor at best and shouldn’t have cast himself as Doug.  The role needs someone with charm (to give us some idea of what compels Claire to stay with Doug) and who’s able to suggest a man who no longer knows when he’s bullshitting and when he’s being honest.  All we see is an actor-director signalling that he believes he’s playing a character with a moral weight.   We don’t hear a lot because Affleck is committed to mumbling – except at the occasional moments when the writing shifts clumsily from determined terseness into soul-baring monologue.

In spite of the eloquent, grimy visuals and the main character’s predicament, you don’t get a strong or developing sense of violent law-breaking having becoming a way of life:  The Town is more concerned with crimes-of-the-fathers melodrama.   You do get this sense in flashes, though:  from Jeremy Renner as Jem, whose psychopathic behaviour is (to him) a matter of doing a job; from Chris Cooper, in his one, very strong scene as Doug’s lifer father.  MacRay senior, although he looks emptied out, retains a bitter impatience with his son:  the older man’s brain is still working more quickly than the younger one’s.  And Pete Postlethwaite is so physically extraordinary – a vicious cadaver – that he’s magnetic, even though the role he’s playing – Fergie, the aging Irish crime boss who runs a florist’s shop as a front for his main line of work – is too familiar.

The moment when Doug shoots Fergie, although the catharsis of the act is an obvious idea, is startling and well staged by Affleck, who shows a lot of skill too in orchestrating the more obvious action highlights, especially a car chase (excitingly edited by Dylan Tichenor).   As in Gone Baby Gone, he’s also good at scary details (Doug’s team wear various alarming masks for their raids) and there’s a genuinely tense sequence when Doug and Claire are out together for a drink and Jem, whom Claire thinks she hasn’t met before, unexpectedly joins them.   Doug knows she’ll recognise the tattoo on Jem’s neck from the bank raid and the swift-moving camera seems to be trying to conceal the evidence as anxiously as he is.  Rebecca Hall’s unknowing vulnerability is affecting here.  The puzzling disappointment in the cast is Jon Hamm as the FBI man on Doug’s tail.   His characterisation is vague and he seems uncomfortable – the cop’s rough, slangy lines sound acted, unnatural.   It’s too soon to conclude that Hamm’s a small screen rather than a big screen actor.  But it’s baffling to watch someone who connects with the Mad Men audience so brilliantly – drawing you in, keeping himself hidden – looking stranded here.

29 September 2010