THE last time I wrote movie reviews, I was writing for another paper. I have written just one movie review for BusinessMirror (specifically, for Personal Fortune, our paper’s magazine) in the last four years I’ve worked here—a piece on Sly Stallone’s comeback movie Rocky Balboa, just because the 1976 Oscar best picture Rocky was one of my favorites.
But writing about The Town is too good to pass up. I read Chuck Hogan’s book Prince of Thieves, on which The Town is based, a couple of years ago, and while it wasn’t a groundbreaking piece of literature, I remember thinking this is one of those books that would translate well into film. I started thinking of the actors who could play the characters in the book as I read it. (For the record, I always do that. In my mind, James Patterson’s Alex Cross would always be Denzel Washington and not Morgan Freeman who eventually played him on film.)
I never imagined Ben Affleck then as the guy to play Doug MacRay, the ex-pro hockey player whose failures drove him to become a career criminal in his hometown of Charlestown, in northeast Boston, where bank robberies are like a family business. But Affleck turns out to be a great Doug. I don’t know why he wasn’t in my radar then. Perhaps because his cheesy performances in movies like Pearl Harbor and Gigli have been ingrained into my psyche, and I forgot that he was also Chuckie in Good Will Hunting.
Well, Affleck proves he’s a terrific actor when he’s not trapped by clichés. He plays the lead role with a smart bitterness that anyone who’s ever failed in life can empathize with. Doug, just like in the book, is rebellious and screwed up, a gangster through and through, but he’s not exactly given up on the promise of love and a life away from crime.
And while Affleck’s acting is quite good here, his direction of The Town is even better. He shows greatness in just his second job at the helm after 2007’s Gone Baby Gone,which wasn’t a bad outing to begin with.
Given that he’s from Boston himself, Affleck handles the script with much insight. It’s no coincidence I think that his best films (Gone Baby Gone, Good Will Hunting), whether as an actor, scriptwriter or director are Boston-centric.
In The Town he captures that special, familial bond Doug shares with his gang of thieves, that right-or-wrong we stand together thing they have, especially his ties with his childhood buddy Jem, a borderline sociopath played brilliantly by Jeremy Renner, the bomb disposal expert in The Hurt Locker.
I like how the movie intercuts these big action sequences of bank heists with introspective scenes that elaborate on the characters’ domestic lives and inner drives. Affleck is able to tell the story of the book seamlessly without going overlong, abetted by brilliant musical scoring and cinematography.
There’s an inner poetry in the bare faces of the actors in this film that can say much more than any dialogue when shown close-up. Indeed, all of the characters from the lead roles to the supporting ones are bluntly honest, real and flawed, which makes them all the more compelling to watch.
Especially making an impression in the smallest of roles are Chris Cooper (as Doug’s dad in prison), Blake Lively, and Pete Postlethwaite. Lively, as Jem’s slutty, drug-addled sister who shares a history with Doug, is so far away from being Serena van der Woodsen (her character in the book-based TV drama Gossip Girl) in this movie she is almost unrecognizable. And Postlethwaite, as the uncompromising and ruthless local crime boss/florist, might be the only actor who can pull off being menacing while trimming roses.
Rebeca Hall, from Vicky Cristina Barcelona, who plays the bank manager and love interest of Doug, shares a nice chemistry with Affleck. If you didn’t know her you’d mistake her for one of the bit actors in the opening sequence. But she has that subtle ordinary cuteness that grows on you the longer you watch her, and she can project genuine vulnerability without being corny or overly dramatic.
There is not a hint of mawkishness in the love story either, which I think defines the film more than the action. It’s the nicest surprise actually, if you haven’t read the book. That despite all the flying bullets, the explosions, the falling bodies and squealing tires, the story is essentially (at least to me) about love and redemption.
The plot is simple but impossible to walk away from. I won’t go into the details but I liked how the adaptation veered away from its source novel, particularly by doing away with the love triangle involving the obsessive FBI agent who’s after Doug (played by John Hamm, Don Draper in TV’s Mad Men), and also by giving us a resolution that is more optimistic, and certainly less tragic than that of the book. Sure, there’s nothing new about star-crossed lovers in a film, even in a crime thriller. But The Town tells an old story told very, very well. ###