The Town

The Town doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to gangster films, but it doesn’t really need to. Sure it’s sacked with a woefully generic title, but it’s so smartly written, ably directed and expertly acted that it is a textbook case in how to do justice to genre filmmaking. If Ben Affleck decided to stick to writing and directing for the rest of his career, I don’t think that I would mind. Based on his two tries at bat it seems that his strengths are more behind-the-scenes then in front of the camera. He’s still learning and growing as a writer-director, he never successfully balances the existential crisis of the main character with the lean-mean-nail-biting anxiety of the crime procedural, but the promise is there.

The Town does two of its three goals very well. First, it’s a tense and gut-punch inducing movie about a group who keeps getting pulled further and further into the criminal demimonde of Boston. Second, as a blue-collar sociological examination of a particular group in a particular place it excels. We get a real sense of place, culture and the messy and murky ties which bind these characters together. Third, and the least successful, is the romantic relationship between Affleck and Rebecca Hall. This is the story point through which we see the change and emotional turmoil. The romance never ignited and felt real, and his emotional journey felt written in short hand and never given the development it needed, but it never derailed the movie in any way.

Despite never truly probing into the psychological edges and fragments that it tries to explore with some depth, The Town hits a truly special stride during some key sequences which show us how much better this movie could have been if it had been made for a smaller budget. Ain’t it the way that the bigger the budget the more demand there is for prototypes, clichés and story check points? Easy and pat character resolutions and developments that plug and chug into a formula and require little emotional or mental effort from the audience and the greatest sequences in The Town evoke a true emotion. It must be doing something right.

Think of the opening scene in which Rebecca Hall’s character is kidnapped and finally released during a routine bank robbery. Her shellshock reaction to taking off the blindfold and seeing the sunlight is wonderfully acted. Or the moment later when Hall and Affleck are having a lunch date and Jeremy Renner, on a career high and delivering a performance just as powerful and committed as The Hurt Locker, enters. He has a tattoo on the back of his neck, which Hall saw while being kidnapped. If she sees it, she’ll be able to put it all together. The way the three actors play the scene is amazing. Affleck straddles the line between trying to be chummy and passive-aggressively telling Renner to get lost. Renner is picking up the signals, but his character loves to live on the brink and push things as far as he possibly can. He toys with the two of them, but doesn’t know that the reason Affleck wants him gone is because of the tattoo. Renner is positively explosive, dangerous and sexy. And, in a very small role, Pete Postlethwaite plays a rose dealer and old-school gangster. He oozes charm and malice in equal doses. Each moment of screen time with him is unrelenting and unnerving. Especially in the casual and friendly way he sends the group to their ultimate demise.

And that brings us to the finale, a finale which is highly implausible but executed to technical and nerve-racking perfection. The gang has been commissioned to undergo one final score – rob Fenway Park. The very notion of robbing Fenway Park is fairly ludicrous, but the movies aren’t always about being probable or possible. And The Town makes it look real enough. Naturally, things do not go according to plan. This was a suicide mission orchestrated by Postlethwaite and none of them knew it.

In a fairly new sub-genre of crime films, that of the Boston-era criminal underworld, the best of them is still The Departed. But with The Town and Gone Baby Gone Affleck has shown a real eye and ear for the sub-genre and shows that it still has room to flourish. Maybe he’ll even top The Departed in one of his next directorial outings. I look forward to the future writer-director work from him.