Affleck proves his talent isn’t gone baby gone

Our TIFF correspondent shares the second installation of his experience, gauging if The Town delivers Oscar-worthy heat

The highly anticipated debut of The Town was achieved through Affleck’s emphasis on concept
Image supplied by: Supplied
The highly anticipated debut of The Town was achieved through Affleck’s emphasis on concept

Movie: The Town

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Halland and Jeremy Renner

Director: Ben Affleck (Gone

Baby Gone)

Writers: Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard

Duration: 123 minutes

3 Stars out of 4

Looks like Beantown is the topical battleground these days for broken hearts and bullet wounds. The Town, Ben Affleck’s second directorial appearance, adds to this array. And with the help of the studio that brought us the truly magnificent The Departed, Affleck should be licking his chops.

The Town carries an Affleck-ian edge—mannered in its subtleties, fearless to expose its motives and held in check with a side of romance.

The brazen Doug MacCray (Ben Affleck) is a citizen of crime-ridden Charleston, Boston, a neighbourhood as prone to bank robberies as their baseball team is to the World Series. He has three friends: James (Jeremy Renner, shining here), Albert (Slaine), and Desmond (Owen Burke). As for vocation, these guys rob banks. As a set up, Affleck informs us: this is the bank robbery capital of America. All of these crimes happen within one square mile of each other. Talk about a tourist tagline.

The Town does something compelling, but expected. It takes its characters and makes them objects of their surroundings. They’re shaped into what they are due to what is given to them. Some sought an escape; others, they submit. Affleck also makes us question our sympathies by first introducing the protagonists in a bank heist, with them as the culprits. After taking a woman named Claire (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage, she begins to complicate things. She sees James’s neck tattoo, creating apprehension. Doug decides to spy on her, which ultimately snowballs into a love affair. Ho-hum.

The Town’s initial flaw is that it acts like an overtly taut, elementary and altered version of Michael Mann’s Heat. Heat’s genius was transcending the tenacious feud between Pacino and De Niro, where Affleck is concerned mostly with establishing relationships and palpitating the film’s energy through dazzlingly frenetic action scenes. They’re done well, but are more eclectic than meaningful.

Essentially The Town has a formulaic first-half, encumbered in familiar conflict and an abrasive style. When watching the first hour of the film, you’ll discover a rather transparent experience: there’s an officer (played by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) pursuing the four looters, a love affair to concoct a scrupulous dilemma and a generalized objective, between the characters, of eluding the town and the fears that bog them down.

Affleck’s screenplay is his best friend and worst enemy. He portrays scenes through classic nuance for example: there’s a gruelingly tense scene involving Doug and Claire eating at a café. James interrupts them, but ignorant of what he’s doing, he doesn’t leave but intrudes. Throughout the whole conversation, Doug maintains his focus on Claire, while also shielding the tattoo from her sight. These are characters who try to honour each other, but can rarely maintain that significant trust.

Fortunately, The Town starts to make sense around the three-quarter point. As most of these Boston true grit crime films turn out, we climax on carnage and a hint of absolution. Freedom comes with a price; some of course live, others do not. What may interrupt Affleck’s poignancy here is that, unlike Gone Baby Gone, The Town forgoes any moral answer. That isn’t necessarily a flaw but it’s perplexing.

For a film that revolves around such a formulaic arc, it ends with only a subtle-symbolic hint alluding to the future rather than a complex-dramatized moral dilemma (which made Gone Baby Gone an ideological tragedy).

What does Affleck do terrifically here? His narrative is seamless; as much as The Town plots along, it adds up. Renner is also a notable supporting star, different from Affleck’s persona because he’s a blown fuse, caught up more on the questions of the past than the future. Affleck is soundly superior in the director’s chair than with his acting voice. As a director, he can control pace as it travels across every wavelength, he spares melodrama and he makes us ponder the characters’ inner realities (which widely vary from their external ones).

What it doesn’t necessarily have? Well, there is one scene where Doug talks to his incarcerated father (Chris Cooper).

“Either you got the heat or you don’t,” his father asserts.

Without question, The Town has no Heat, but it develops some voracious Affleck-ian fire.

Please see Friday’s issue for Mott’s review of the TIFF film, The Conspirator.

All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.

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