The Town

The Town is a crime picture directed by, and starring, Ben Affleck. Implausible and only mildly entertaining, it’s set in Charlestown, a Boston suburb that, apparently, specializes in bank and armored car robbery. Affleck plays a thug with a heart of gold, the kind of role that you might imagine for Marlon Brando. After orchestrating a brutal bank robbery, Affleck’s character initiates a love affair with a pretty bank teller briefly taken hostage in the caper. Affleck has puppy-dog eyes and a tragic backstory – its seems that a vicious local mobster, played by the sadly frail Peter Posthelwaite (he died shortly after the film was made) murdered his mother with an overdose of drugs and castrated his dad. All this occurred (for obscure reasons) when Affleck’s character was six-years old, and, needless to say, the poor guy had a touch childhood. Affleck’s best friend is a thug with impulse control issues – sort of like the character played by Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets or the various petite brutes that Joey Pesci has impersonated. The hero wants to go straight and embark on a meaningful and lasting relationship with the comely bank teller, but his criminal roots drag him down into one last bloody, and disastrous, heist. Everything about the movie is completely derivative; the film retails various imitations from better pictures and a lot of Affleck’s acting seems to imitate the kind of inarticulate, but sincere poetry that Sylvester Stallone made a specialty in films like First Blood and the Rocky series. The movie uses a Boston patois that is often indecipherable and that to Midwestern ears seems somewhat laughable – these thugs talk like Maine lobstermen: you expect them to threaten people with severe tweaking by lobster claw or nibbling by crabs. The lingo just doesn’t sound menacing. The camera swirls around dialogue shots as if wondering how to keep the attention-deficit audience engaged – there’s lot of spiraling and pointless spinning. There are a couple of good chase scenes. The best chase scenes have a kind of nightmarish menace – we’ve all dreamt of being pursued and an effective chase sequence capitalizes on that experience. (In this regard, I’m thinking of the very scary chase scenes in Paul Haggis’ recent The Next Three Days or the opening sequence in Refn’s otherwise awful Drive). Although the chase scenes in the movie are well-choreographed, we don’t care enough about the actors to get excited by all the flamboyant (and unbelievable) action. There’s some picturesque dialogue but it’s really not credible – the poetic scenes are self-evidently just indulgences granted to the actors. Crime pictures persuade by their sense of verisimilitude – for some reason, the genre doesn’t work unless we are persuaded that the milieu and its people are realistically portrayed. Despite all the dialect and location shots, The Town seems mostly derived from other, better movies. (It’s a reasonable diversion for a couple hours – by 17-year old daughter thought the movie was okay.)

On Saturday Night Live, there was a great line about Mitt Romney: “he’s a white politician who talks exactly like a black comedian imitating a white politician”. This is the best description of Romney’s peculiar oratory that I have read or heard anywhere.

Another bête noire: in The Town, armies of Boston cops are always charging into hails of machine gun fire flung their way by the protagonists of the film. Cops are civil servants first and foremost: they do not boldly advance into machine gun fire. No cop will ever approach a scene of danger without twenty reinforcements and, then, police do not launch frontal assaults or anything of that kind. Study the Columbine massacre to learn how cops approach folks with firearms that are inclined to use them. Police work is largely bullying people. Police, intelligently in my view, do not attack bad guys who are shooting at them – rather, they undertake prolonged, tedious sieges and hope that the embattled villain will have the good sense to shoot himself. Scriptwriters should take note!