Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/19/10
America (or at least those
Americans who bought tickets) stood in stunned silence as Oscar winning
screenwriter-turned-movie star-turned-washed up media whipping boy Ben
Affleck reinvented himself as a genuinely gifted filmmaker with his auspicious
2007 directorial debut Gone Baby Gone.
For his follow-up, he returns to Boston, the city that has served as his
muse all the way back to that breakthrough screenplay Good Will Hunting.
The Town is, specifically, about Charlestown, a Beantown neighborhood
that is, we're told, the bank robbery capital of the United States.
As with his previous film, Affleck assembles a terrific cast (which he
this time leads himself) and gives them great characters to play.
Unlike Baby, with its airtight no-win moral conundrum, The Town's
thematic underpinnings are a little slippery. But Affleck directs
the plentiful action with surprising skill and delivers a movie that's
sometimes gripping and never less than diverting. I suspect in a
few years, we'll be calling it “lesser Affleck”, a term that used to be
reserved for the likes of Surviving Christmas.
Doug MacRay was raised by
criminals. Until his incarceration, it was his father Stephen (Chris
Cooper), and then the Coughlin family that made Jim (Jeremy Renner) his
de facto brother and Krista (Blake Lively) his preordained girlfriend.
While she chose drug dealing as her vocation, Doug and Jim did what
many men in Charlestown do, they robbed banks. As the movie opens,
their crew is robbing a bank while Jim feels the need to get extra violent
with one manager (Victor Garber) and take another, Claire Keesey (Rebecca
Hall) as a hostage. She's released, but he keeps her driver's license,
leaving her afraid to cooperate with the FBI's point man on the case, Special
Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm). Jim starts tossing around euphemisms about
killing her to keep her quiet, so Doug takes it upon himself to ask her
on a date (they were masked and she was blindfolded) to find out what she
knows. The relationship quickly blossoms and pushes Doug toward a
decision: he wants to leave Charlestown and start over. But
Frawley is closing in, “The Florist” (Pete Postlethwaite) who gives the
crew their jobs has no interest in letting him go, and how exactly is he
to tell his former hostage the truth about who he really is?
The Town's setup,
outlined in its excellent trailer, is gold. We all feel a little
bit trapped by the circumstances of our lives, so we can empathize with
a criminal who never really had a chance to be anything else, and the contrast
between Doug's thoughtful, well-planned school of robbery and Jim's mad,
violent improvisation only makes him all the more sympathetic. Affleck
and Hall enjoy solid chemistry as a couple, so we can also feel the pull
of leaving his life behind for a more idealized one. Lively also
helps out by nailing a certain kind of well-intentioned trampiness I can
imagine will become a stable of the Affleck cannon (as Amy Ryan played
a harsher variation on the same character in Gone). Hamm specializes
in officious odiousness, and here he does an amazing (and delightful) job
of making the FBI seem like the bad guys.
But once we move beyond that
setup, The Town's storytelling becomes a little more murky.
Claire's motivations become increasingly hard to understand, since as the
victim of a crime, her opposition to the FBI even when she doesn't know
who Doug is requires some sort of explanation we never get. I kinda
felt like the final reel had gotten Stockholm Syndrome itself from spending
too much time with the sympathetic Bad Guys and the rotten Good Guy.
For all its talk about the wages of sin and having to pay the price for
our past mistakes, the closing scenes still seem oddly pro-bank robbery
and the final shot is the kind of thing studios used to overrule filmmakers
and impose.
But this remains a crisply
made and diverting crime thriller, and for a change, audiences pulled in
by an action-packed trailer will actually see a fairly large amount of
gunplay and car chasing, all of which are exceptionally well-mounted.
There's a good sense of surprise and impact to the action, and a centerpiece
car chase has solid logistic and strategy. A climactic shootout at
Fenway Park shows remarkable lack of concern for the venerable stadium
from a filmmaker who's one of the Red Sox biggest celebrity fans.
The score by David Buckley and Harry Gregson-Williams has a lot of zip
as well.
Affleck, who really seemed
to turn a corner as an actor with Hollywoodland, is great in his
first leading role in six years: even if the movie forgives Doug
a little more than it should, its creator does everything he can to sell
us on the fact that he wants to get out of his life so strongly that we
should excuse everything he does before doing so. Claire is a hard
character to get a handle on, but Hall does all she can to bring her to
life. Hamm lives large and delivers all the movie's laughs, while
Lost's Titus Welliver does a terrific job infusing is partner with
depth and untold backstory just with the occasional sideways glance.
Renner, making his first major studio appearance since his Hurt
Locker breakthrough, is wonderfully unpredictable and dangerous as
Jim. An early scene has him catching Doug and Claire at a cafe and
pulling up a seat: it crackles with suspense because you literally
have no idea what he's going to do. Cooper is only in one scene but
it looms over all that follows: it's a true tour de force as he paints
vivid portraits of both who Doug's father was during his son's formative
years and a man so hard that even at his advanced age, he's still picking
fights behind bars. Postlethwaite is wonderfully scary, all the more
so because while he's threatening all manner of unspeakable acts, he seems
like a pretty good florist.
The criminals-point-of-view
thriller is not one of my favorite genres, so I expect slicker execution
to get really excited about one. But people who really loved moves
like Heat and The Departed will likely
feel the same way about The Town. It's exceptionally acted
and delivers solid bang for your action buck. While it's far from
the finest hour of Ben Affleck the screenwriter (he's one of three credited,
along with his writing partner Aaron Stockard and Peter Craig), it cements
Affleck the director as somebody we'll be hearing a lot from in the years
to come. Gigli 2 might have to wait. |
