The Town

Imagine you're Ben Affleck. If that disturbs you too much, imagine you're Matt Damon instead. Now, if you're imagining you're Ben Affleck you'll be smarting a little from a less than stellar career trajectory. If you're doing the other thing, pretending to be Matt Damon, you'll be pretty stoked with how well your career choices have panned out for you. But going back to Ben Affleck, you'll be annoyed with how you cut your teeth on a series of cult indie films (Dazed and Confused, Chasing Amy, Glory Daze) and then won an Oscar for co-writing the script for Good Will Hunting, only for your career to then stall on a series of mediocre films (Reindeer Games, Bounce, Daredevil) before washing up on the shores of career suicide with Gigli and Jersey Girl. What do you do in that situation? Well, Affleck had staked out an escape route quite early on in his career with Good Will Hunting... his ability to invest in the production side of filmmaking meant that he still had some cred up his sleeve after becoming such a gormless joke of a leading man, and so he turned to directing.

So... you're Ben Affleck. People can't say your name without smirking, and they certainly can't look at you and take you seriously anymore. So you disappear behind the camera. You co-write and direct a noir-ish crime movie called Gone Baby Gone. You get your younger brother (fresh off an Oscar nomination of his own) to star as the lead and you win a whole heap of plaudits from the critics, who are somewhat surprised at this career 180. Your next step? Repeat the success of Gone Baby Gone but with yourself as the lead actor. Rehabilitation complete.

The Town is actually a really good film. Affleck is perhaps a little vain to cast himself as the 'good' bad guy at the centre of the film, but I managed to watch him do his thing with minimal smirking. The premise of The Town is that the Charlestown area of Boston is apparently the bank robbery capital of the world. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the brains behind a four-man outfit who specialise in armed holdups. MacRay's crew successfully robs a bank and uses a hostage (Rebecca Hall) to aid their escape. It looks like they've evaded the attention of the FBI (represented by Mad Men's Jon Hamm) but MacRay and his right-hand man Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) realise that their hostage is actually a woman who lives in their neighbourhood. Coughlin wants to kill her, but MacRay crosses paths with her at the local laundromat and begins to keep tabs on her - a relationship that veers into dangerously romantic territory.

So, at the forefront of The Town is this story about career criminals and the unfolding shitstorm that surrounds this possible witness and the ambitious FBI guy who wants to take them down. MacRay finds his motivation for the criminal lifestyle compromised by his relationship with the witness and so he starts planning to distant himself from his crew before it's too late. Obviously this is a pretty tricky process... for a start, MacRay is following in the footsteps of his incarcerated father (Chris Cooper). His best friend Coughlin is aggressively unwilling to continue the robberies without MacRay, and the local gangster who bankrolls them (Pete Postlethwaite) is a hard man to walk away from. Behind all this is this other story... a story about Charlestown and a story about lower socio-economic working class districts all over the western world. It's about the pride, poverty and fractured families that beget these dangerous criminal lifestyles. MacRay is a product of an alcoholic deadbeat dad and an absent mother who never wanted kids, it's a story that would be sad if it wasn't echoed in every other family in Charlestown. It's a world of broken dreams and easy money, and our sympathy for MacRay isn't neccessarily rooted in his more gentlemanly qualities but in the fact that he is going to try and break free from this cycle no matter the cost. That's the transformative power of love. It might sounds a bit girly when you describe it like that but Affleck makes it accessible by shrouding it in a story full of smartarse repartee and brutal gunfights.

The Town is primarily structured around three robberies - one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end. Between these visually rewarding set pieces is a story that builds itself in layers thanks to some brilliant little touches of local realism... there's one great scene where MacRay's crew has just committed a bank robbery. They come across an old cop in their nun costumes and AK47s. The old cop sees them, he's probably aware that the cops and FBI are scrambling all over town to find them, and he stares at them as they stare back at him. Will he make a move? Will they kill him? He just looks the other way, and they move on... he's an old cop and he doesn't want to die. More importantly he's also a part of the community and knows that someone else will get him down the line if he does anything to stop MacRay's crew. That fear and that situation is realistic... it might take place in an unrealistic situation (bank robbers dressed as nuns and armed with military-level weaponry) but it works because it's indicative of the world Affleck is evoking and tapping into. The viewer may become confused about where their sympathy lies in a film like this... the FBI character played by Jon Hamm is shown gloating and threatening MacRay whilst MacRay just sits there all calm and collected. We follow MacRay's point of view for the bulk of the film so it's fairly obvious that we're meant to sympathise with Affleck's character. I mean, MacRay even labels these FBI guys as traitors to their community. It's slightly disturbing that the viewer's loyalty should be manipulated so blatantly onto the side of these brutal thieves, but a lot of the film's subtext (about community pride and the code of the silence that goes with it) points to this sad state of affairs as a byproduct of our society. The film may not be entirely conscious that it's doing this, but I think it's a valid examination of today's issues all the same.

You should watch this film, it's like Heat but much better. Everything about it works and I'm hoping it's the start of a long career for Affleck as an auteur specialising in modern-day crime epics.

DIRECTOR: Ben Affleck
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard. Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan.
KEY ACTORS: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Black Lively, Slaine, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Affleck's original cut of The Town was apparently four hours long and nearly identical to it's source material. He recut it down to two hours and fifty minutes (also fairly faithful) and then finally into the two hour cinematic cut that was released.
- Gone Baby Gone was Ben Affleck's debut feature film as a director. It also concerned crime and ethics in connection to inner city poverty.
- For an Australian perspective on career criminal families who specialise in armed robbery, see Animal Kingdom.
- For more big scale robberies and machine-gun battles in the street, see Heat. For more thoughful but equally squalid heist mechanics, check out Stanley Kubrick's highly influential film noir The Killing.
- I think some of the more intelligent dialogue and a lot of the FBI scenes were clearly influenced by the awesome television show The Wire. Quote, "We'll never get 24 hour surveillance unless one of these idiots converts to Islam".

AWARDS:
Academy Awards - nominated Best Supporting Actor (Jeremy Renner)
BAFTAs - nominated Best Supporting Actor (Pete Postlethwaite)
Golden Globes - nominated Best Supporting Actor (Renner)