Ben Affleck stars in and directs Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a three-act play about the fictional village of Grover’s Corners. No, wait. It turns out that the film’s name is actually The Town and, as it happens, it isn’t about Grover’s Corners at all. It’s about Charlestown, a gritty neighborhood in Boston. I have noticed that all movies set in Boston seem to revolve around gritty neighborhoods. If you want to produce a bleak crime drama, Boston’s your place. (What exactly does the Chamber of Commerce actually do up there, anyway?)
I am reluctant to admit that I was one of those scoffers who never took Affleck seriously. Maybe it was the Pearl Harbor debacle. Maybe it was the whole J-Lo thing. I began to change my tune with his performance in Changing Lanes with Samuel L. Jackson. Affleck, it occurred to me, was a serious actor after all. It turns out he’s also not a half-bad writer (Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone) nor a half-bad director. He is all of them with The Town and he does all of them well. At least from a technical standpoint.
Affleck plays career bank robber Doug MacRay. He and his partners, including the volatile Jim Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), are pros. They know how to get in, get the employees and customers under control, get the money from the vault, and get the hell out. And they know how to do it (MacRay admits to watching a lot of CSI episodes) without so much as leaving a single trace of DNA behind. This makes things problematic for FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) who spends the film trying hard to solve the puzzle of who these guys are and where they’ll strike next. The last thing Frawley wants is to fail, and be relegated to a desk job the way that the Review forum was relegated to “sub-forum” status of Arts, Music, and Entertainment (but let us leave that for another thread).
Meanwhile, the bank robbers have problems of their own. The one person who can possibly identify them – a bank manager named Claire (Rebecca Hall) whom the gang kidnaps during one of their heists – just happens to end up as the target of MacRay’s affection. He follows her for a couple days after they release her (just to make sure she’ll be no danger to them, he assures the others) and ends up falling for her. They meet in a laundromat and ultimately become lovers. Naturally the rest of the plot centers around whether she’ll find out MacRay’s true identity, which of course would put something of a damper on the relationship.
Or would it? Without divulging too much of the plot, I can say that here is where the film lost me. As technically proficient as Affleck is with the directing, and as intriguing as the story is, fully-developed, realistic character motivation gets left behind. I never quite understood MacRay’s motivation in continuing his crime spree (which becomes more and more violent as the film proceeds and is completely at odds with the sympathetic portrayal of MacRay that Affleck is obviously going for), nor did I understand Claire’s motivations once the secret is out.
Overall, lots of potential and lots of talent end up leading to some serious head-scratching. Still, the film is watchable and Affleck is good, dammit. He really is.
7/10
