Film Review | The Town

Ben Affleck’s career is a strange animal indeed. Starting off as a child actor, then moving on to roles in the slacker-geek films of Kevin Smith, he exploded when he got to share a Best Original Screenplay Oscar with Matt Damon, for 1997’s Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant.

But whereas managed to maintain a good handle on the spotlight, mixing the high and the low, ascended into the Hollywood machine with Michael Bay blockbusters Armageddon and Pearl Harbour (while accumulating critical ire throughout), only to be shot down with flops like Daredevil and Gigli, in which he co-starred with his then wife Jennifer Lopez, and whose box office and critical outcome was about as disastrous as their relationship.

But when a period piece that seemed to mirror his predicament came along, not only did his luck begin to change for the better – we were finally getting to see the talent behind the chiselled chin and awkward pseudo-charm. Hollywoodland, the story of the doomed Superman actor George Reeves, was a perfect fit for his embittered state, and did its bit in restoring him as a key Hollywood player. What followed was even more surprising. In 2009 he decided to adapt Gone Baby Gone, a novel by the Mystic River scribe about how the abduction of a girl affects a Boston neighbourhood. And he was actually successful.

Now, he returns to his home down with a decisively more entertaining piece.

The bulk of bank robberies in Boston happen in the one-square-mile neighborhood of Charlestown, the opening caption of The Town reveals to us.

One of these robbers is Doug MacRay (Affleck), who had a chance at leaving for greener pastures but instead chose to follow in his father (Chris Cooper)steps, becoming the leader of a crew of dementedly efficient robbers, one of them being his as-close-as-a-brother friend (Jeremy Renner). His romantic life is also stalled: he has a child by the drug addicted Krista (Blake Lively), but isn’t up to paternal responsibility.

Things come to a head when the crew decides to take a bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage after one of their robberies, blindfolding her and letting her go on the beach. The gang then begin to panic, fearing that Claire might be able to identify them. Knowing better than to let the volatile Jem go after her, Doug takes the matter into his own hands, only to gradually fall in love with her.

As an FBI investigation into the robberies –  led by Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) – gets underway, Doug is trapped by the very uncomfortable decisions he is going to have to make.

As such, this is a film made entirely out of gruff and working class (or ‘blue collar’) muscle: the manly men are afflicted with manly angst and sort through it in the only way they know how: by huffing and puffing before bursting into acts of violence (both random and seemingly premeditated). But far from being a swaggering showcase of Hollywood machismo, Affleck takes care to craft a setting amenable to violence from the beginning, so the viewer never feels that the characters are either psychotic or just caricatures (the neighbourhood renders them, essentially, as something in between those two).

Of course, there comes a point when we have to stop the essentially patronising oohing and aahing over the fact that Affleck – the very same Affleck who retreated into a safe marriage and a Poker addiction after his ventures (both romantic and cinematic) with JLo led his career to implode – was responsible for putting this rich repast of action and drama together. The facts provide perspective: he has directed the far more thematically and emotionally challenging Gone Baby Gone already, he takes the plot and characters from Hogan’s novel, has a very clear cinematic precedent in Mann’s Heat, which looms almost oppressively at times and, most glaringly, works within the same milieu he both grew up in and explored in his directorial debut.

Not to mention the fact that the performances are top-notch, with each actor bringing their A-game to the mix, and you automatically have a potent cocktail. Renner confirms that he’s the Hollywood It Boy to watch – fresh from a spine-jangling turn in The Hurt Locker, he’s an equally on-the-edge powder keg, reminding Doug that leaving the neighbourhood behind is going to be very, very difficult.

Affleck even manages to reinvent two television icons, from opposing sides of the pop culture spectrum. Jon Hamm, known to audiences far and wide as the sleek, morally ambiguous advertising mogul Don Draper from Mad Men, fully shifts to police hard man mode while at the same time retaining the masculine charm that made Draper such a memorable character. Just watch him predict Doug’s bleak future during an interrogation in typical bad cop fashion, only to flirt his way into some information when he sidles up to Krista in a local bar.

Lively is bound to disappoint her Gossip Girl fans, as the blonde beauty slums with the best of them, and you just know there isn’t even an Oscar at the end of this – the film is far too much fun for that – but she goes at it with full force anyway: caking on the slutty make-up and slurring her way through lines punctuated with vicious regret.

The old guard stand the film in good stead too: Chris Cooper’s cameo as Doug’s dad – imprisoned for bank robbery, confirming the oddly hereditary nature of Charlestown bank robbers – is heartbreaking, while Pete Postlethwaite’s Fergie ‘The Florist’, the true Irish gangster and the band’s ringleader, is quietly terrifying – a character you wouldn’t want to mess with despite his near-arthritic frame. It is touches such as this that lend colour and depth to a plot that remains, at the end of the day, a serviceable genre piece.