Affleck’s The Town
Cops and Robbahs
By: Charles Giuliano - Oct 01, 2010
A colleague raved about Ben Affleck’s The Town as one of the better movies made about Boston. Well, Charlestown actually. Warned that it is violent.
That’s saying something as the category of Best Movie About Boston, Southie actually, was nailed down with Martin Scorsese’s, The Departed (2006).
Significantly The Departed featured Matt Damon with Jack Nicholson. To date, Affleck’s greatest accomplishment was sharing an Oscar with Damon for their 1997 screenplay Good Will Hunting. They grew up together in Cambridge where Damon attended but dropped out of Harvard. Then, as now, Damon was the brains of the duo.
Since then Affleck has performed in turkey after turkey from a true disaster of a film, Pearl Harbor, to the film which everyone hates but nobody actually saw Gigli with former squeeze Jennifer Lopez. He famously dated Gwyneth Paltrow and is married to Jennifer Garner. Seems chicks dig him. Can’t quite grasp why. Is it his height, and abs of steel, or that wooden expression and flat delivery? Perhaps he packs heat. Wouldn’t know about that.
With my friend’s recommendation and warning we checked out The Town at our local cinema. It was fun to take in a movie. Our first in months. I waved to the projectionist before the film. Later, in the lobby, he asked what I thought. “Ok, I guess, so so” I said. “Yeah, same here” he said. Seems he sees a lot of movies.
Will we see Affleck come Oscar night? Could be. He has several options as actor/ star, screenwriter, and director. Depends on the field.
But this film is so much better than his usual flops that critics and fans are gushing it up with hyperbole as a work of genius. A breakthrough, or most of all, a comeback.
Fuggedahabouit. Oops. Wrong word. This is supposed to be about Irish mobsters clustered around the Bunker Hill Monument. It seems Charlestown, per capita, is the world’s greatest spawner of hoods and bank robbers this side of, well, Southie. The local joke is that to rob a bank in Charlestown you shoot it out with the cops. In Southie you pay them off. Ditto the FBI.
There are a lot of shoot outs in this film. Bang, bang.
Seems the FBI agent in this film, Mad Men heart throb, Jon Hamm, is actually honest. There is not a hint of irony, or depth, to his role. Straight no chaser. Affleck wrote him into the script purely for star power and sex appeal. Although he doesn’t get to play any romantic or sexy scenes.
That’s left to Ben showing that magnificent body doing chin ups. Or rolling about boffing the aristocratic Rebecca Hall. Entirely implausibly she was the kidnapped bank assistant manager during a botched heist. When they got away he gallantly let her free. But did she know anything that the FBI can pin on them?
Affleck’s Doug MacRay opts to tail her. As luck would have it those crazy kids fall in love. In stumble fumble Bostanese he talks about leaving the game and taking off with her for Tangerine, Florida.
But, how hum, how does this sound familiar, you can’t just walk away from the game. He owes big time to his mates. He is, get this, the master mind of the game. Hey, it’s all relative. Compared to his nitwit pals MacRay is Einstein. There’s a mumble bumble back story about his junkie mom who abandoned him as a kid. And his dad, played by Chris Cooper, who he visits in the slammer. The sensitive, and apparently lovable, aspect of this street hood is that he misses him mom and wants to unearth the truth of why she abandoned him.
The one who know, plot thickens, is the hood he launders money through, and pays off to, the florist (a front) Fergie Colm. He is portrayed in an underwritten role by the positively brilliant British character actor Pete Postelthwaite.
Given his box office appeal Affleck was able to assemble and underemploy a terrific cast. During the heist scene, for example, the bank manager groveling on the floor, with just a couple of lines, was Victor Garber. He must have been in town for a wedding and Affleck spotted him in the hotel bar on the day of the shoot. Hey Victor, wannah be in my movie?
For his leading lady, Jennifer was home taking care of the kids, Ben beds British royalty, so to speak, in Hall. She is the daughter of Sir Peter Hall the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her mother is Maria Ewing an opera singer. While Hall is easy on the eyes and conveys a range of emotions from fear to love, trust, betrayal and conspiracy there is no heavy lifting in the role.
Compared to Ben’s appropriately flat Charlestown accent Hall’s is generically autocratic. She’s a quality girl not like his slutty, junkie girlfriend who spills the beans to the Feds for a fix.
Which sets up the spectacular shoot out when Ben and his pals attempt to stick up the money room at Fenway Park for a couple of mil. They all go down while Ben manages to slip away. He escapes a Fed trap and leaves her a bag of cash and a tangerine (hint) buried in her garden plot. She’s avid about petunias.
On his way out of Town it seems the Florist is now pushing up daisies. But Ben is smelling of roses. She uses the tainted cash to pay for a hockey rink for the kids. Appears that, back in the day, Doug washed out of the pros. “I can’t skate backwards which you need to do in the pros” he explained to her.
Yeah Ben, in more ways than one.