The Town
“It’ll be just like one of my sunny days.”
by Jonathan McDonald
Moviegoers who enjoyed Affleck’s first directorial effort Gone Baby Gone may feel frustrated with his new movie The Town, eschewing as it does the earlier movie’s slow and meditative pacing for a more action-oriented approach. There is no doubt that focusing on the gun-toting action of heists is a crowd-pleaser, and the box office returns seem to bear that out. There are a total of three heists in this film, each unique in its approach and in its target, each smartly conceived and almost flawlessly executed. Even if this film does nothing more than sell Affleck as a solid action director, it would be entirely justified in doing so, as he shows off a skill of choreography that makes films with nearly incomprehensible action scenes like The Bourne Identity look amateurish.
Affleck sets this story in his native Boston, a city which is frequently the backdrop of his films. According to a quote at the start of the film, the neighborhood of Charlestown in Boston is home to the largest concentration of bank robbers in the city, and Charleston is where our robbers live. Doug (Affleck) and Jem (Jeremy Renner) are the leaders of this small pack of thieves, joined in the wings by Krista (Blake Lively), Jem’s sister and Doug’s occasional girlfriend. Doug grew up lonely after his mother mysteriously disappeared when he was a child and his father Stephan (Chris Cooper) was taken away to prison. He has lived in agony wondering if his mother was even alive, and where she might be if so. He was raised in part by Jem’s family, and feels a loyalty to them that is frequently tested by Jem’s reckless brutality and by Krista’s unwanted affections. He works for The Florist (Pete Postlethwaite), an Irish would-be godfather of crime who terrorizes his underlings with threats he may or may not be able to carry out.
This delicate balance of futility begins to spiral out of control when Doug’s gang briefly kidnap the bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) during a robbery of her branch. They release her once they are clear of police capture, but Doug is sent to follow her afterwards to make sure she doesn’t talk to the feds, and even more importantly to make sure she has nothing to talk about. Unfortunately for the both of them, he quickly falls for her, and she unknowingly begins dating the man who terrorized her and put her in constant fear of her life; the robbers’ warning that they would kill her if she talks to the FBI rings loud and clear in her mind. She doesn’t really want to fall in love, but Doug’s affections offer a stability that she desperately needs, and that he desperately wants.
The central theme of the film seems to flow from an epigraph that appears in Prince of Thieves, the novel The Town was adapted from, but which does not itself appear in the movie: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” a biblical quotation from the Gospel of Matthew. Just as Gone Baby Gone revolved around around the biblical aphorism “Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves,” so does The Town seem to methodically chew on the ideas of treasure and the human heart. Doug is in the thievery business because it was the family business, but his heart was always reaching out for his broken family. Jem, too, is interested more in family than in money, but he is unable to separate the two goals. Krista wants Doug to settle down with her and her toddler daughter who may or may not be his, but helps out with the men’s operations in the mean time. Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) desires the capture of evildoers, and cannot find satisfaction without it. In the end, Doug tries to find a way to leave his treasure with his heart, in the most selfless way he knows how.
It is unfortunate that The Town doesn’t live up to the promise of Gone Baby Gone (another novel-based film, I should point out), but it was a hard act to follow, and there seems to be little doubt that Affleck is a very ambitious director who will doubtless continue to surprise audiences with his skill. In fact, he deserves to be known more as a director than as an actor, for in the latter he seems to have found his true calling. Even if there is no performance here to compare to Amy Ryan’s drug-addled mother, the cast of his newest film is still more than up to the task of fleshing out this pathetic group of friends. Here’s to hoping he continues to surprise and thrill us, and that his next film won’t take another three years to make.
Rating: Impressive
Written on September 25, 2010 by Jonathan
Points of Interest: Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Crime/Gangster, Jeremy Renner, On DVD, Rebecca Hall
Letters to the Editor
No letters yet.
Leave a letter!
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://thephotoplay.com/blog/2010/09/the-town/trackback/