THE TOWN (Affleck 2010) 6/10

With The Town, Ben Affleck has become what American showbiz journalists used to call a “triple threat” – he stars, he directs, and he co-wrote the screenplay. And if he doesn’t exactly excel in any of these three jobs, nor is he so inept in any of them that the resulting movie, for all its faults, is anything less than adequately serviceable.
   Oddly enough, The Town feels a little more like a safe-hands, learning-the-ropes directorial debut than Affleck’s first stint behind the camera, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone – like his follow-up, an adaptation of a crime novel set in the Boston area. Affleck didn’t appear in the previous movie, instead casting his brother Casey (by general consensus the more accomplished thespian of the pair) and concentrating on transferring a tricky narrative to the screen as director and co-writer.
   And he indeed managed to do so – not bad going considering this was Affleck’s first screenwriting credit since his Oscar win with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting a decade before (Affleck has collaborated with Aaron Stockard on the scripts of both the pictures he’s directed, with Peter Craig also working on The Town, based on Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel Prince of Thieves.) One reviewer described Hogan’s book as “a long-winded labyrinth of inner reflection… [the] novel is overlong by more than half” – and The Town also outstays its welcome somewhat, struggling to contain its various plots and sub-plots within a two-hour running-time (and in the end failing to do so by five minutes, including the opening and closing titles.*)
   As in Prince of Thieves, the main focus is on career criminal Doug McRay (Ben Affleck), a hot ice-hockey prospect in his youth but now one of the many residents of Boston-area suburb Charlestown to make a living from armed robbery. Indeed, according to an opening title-card, this particular “town” has the USA’s highest concentration of bank-robbers (an assertion which has been challenged by some criminologists andmany Charlestown residents)… a bit like James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) in reverse.
   The film begins with the latest heist carried out by Doug and his masked, ultra-conscientious gang – which including his long-time best pal, the hot-headed and trigger-happy Jem (Jeremy Renner) – under instructions from local crime king-pin Fergus ‘The Florist’ McColm (Pete Postlethwaite essaying a rather strangulated Ulster brogue.) This bank-heist leaves manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) traumatised, not least because she fears reprisals from the gang as she may well have glimpsed certain key features which could lead to their identification.
   Conscious of this, Doug sets out – unmasked – to find out how much Claire knows/remembers, befriending her in their laundromat: he’s able to do so because (a)  Claire and Doug are near-neighbours, (b) despite her well-paid position and well-appointed flat, Claire apparently owns no washing-machine of her own and (c) this highly attractive, intelligent and engaging young woman has nothing resembling friends or family to help her recover from her ordeal, thus sending her straight into Doug’s welcoming, manly embrace.
   These are far from the only contrivances and implausibilities in Affleck and Stockard’s script, though without reading the book it’s impossible to know if they’ve been lifted directly from Hogan’s novel. And The Town, reasonable time-passer as it is, isn’t the kind of stuff to send viewers running from their multiplexes to the nearest bookshop. A quick skim through various reviews, however, does reveal that the original was essentially a love-triangle in which Frawley and McRay ended up vying for Claire’s romantic affections – if he got nothing else right, Affleck was wise to dispense with that particular element.
   As it is, there’s a certain amount of chemistry between the toothily equine duo of Affleck and Hall, though the former does fall into the classic actor-director’s trap of giving himself far too many moody closeups – indeed, at times The Town feels like a study of how the stubble catches the light just-so on the planes of his leanly chiselled face. There’s also a brief shot of Doug working out topless (performing pull-ups with moody lighting from below), presumably included to delight Affleck’s female and gay admirers, which is reminiscent of the show-offy athletic sequences Will Smith is fond of shoehorning into his star vehicles, and represents a narcissistic step too far.
   Affleck is nothing if not keen to please, of course, and The Town seeks to combine the thick-ear macho gun-play and car-smashes of the male-oriented crime thriller (plus a very close attention to the nuts and bolts of the armed-robbers’ craft) with more sensitive, smoochy interludes – Doug not being such a bad guy underneath his muscled, tattooed, crop-headed bluster – for distaff audiences. The mixture doesn’t quite come off – the film a bit is too violent to be a “date movie,” a bit too soft-centred to really convince as a compelling modern noir, Renner’s amusingly Cagney-ish ferocity notwithstanding.
   What Affleck** seems to be after is a combination of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates’ chilly Boston-set, character-based bank-robbery cult classic from 1973) and Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) – it’s now apparently impossible to stage a bank heist in a Hollywood movie without nodding to the enduringly seminal score from the latter movie, and Harry Gregson-Williams and David Buckley duly ape Elliot Goldenthal’s propulsive, percussive, heart-beat-like efforts here. Indeed, with further “borrowings” from Good Will Hunting, The Wire and more, it’s quite ironic that The Town should itself represent a series of small-scale creative larcenies on earlier, more accomplished works.

Neil Young
16th October, 2010

THE TOWN
[6/10] : US 2010 : Ben AFFLECK : 124m
seen 9/Oct/10 at Cineworld, Boldon (£7.20) : 16/28

* Editor is Dylan Tichenor, who has an outstanding “scorecard” in terms of the outstanding movies he’s worked on over the years (this is only his sixth credit since 2005, the others being Brokeback Mountain, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Doubt, There Will Be Blood, and Whip It). The Town won’t count as his finest hour by a long way, though he does sneak in a couple of fleeting grace-notes (some shots of pigeons; a pan up to an unidentified figure peeking down through a skylight) that add a touch of class to proceedings.
   This is the fourth time Tichenor has worked on a film shot by cinematographer Robert Elswit – the others being Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. Fast company.

** Affleck’s next gig should ideally be a remake of this, co-starring Damon.