THE TOWN

The Town is more a companion piece than a follow up to Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. It doesn’t aim as deep but still manages to prove thoughtful questions about ethics and, if anything, further erases the line between good guys and bad guys. It’s also a first-rate thriller with its cast in great form, including Affleck himself who takes the lead as Doug MacRay, a professional armed robber with a conscience or, at least, an eye for the delicate vulnerability of Claire (Rebecca Hall) the young bank manager he takes ransom with his cronies and then falls for.

            If Doug sounds too good to be true, a sort of lovable rogue, the movie never stoops so low as to make him something of a thief with a heart of gold or a Robin Hood. He can be, when the need arises, as violent as his associates. Doug’s distinction is that he is more level-headed than the explosive Jem, played by Jeremy Renner capturing both the charisma and the ferocity of James Cagney at his finest. Jem’s temper often impairs his judgment and leads to his demise during a fool-hardy stand-off with the FBI, adding him to the hall-of-fame of hoods killed when their hot-head got a little too big for their britches. But unlike the whacking of Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, a humiliating demise for such a mean little monster, Jem goes out guns blazing like Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces and White Heat.

            Ostensibly, Doug and Jem are at opposite ends of their posse’s violence spectrum (the other two are largely left blank), but when they’re robbing a bank or hijacking a truck, their masks make them virtually indistinguishable in more than a physical sense. In that moment they are equally dangerous, essentially the same person. The intelligence of The Town is similar to that of Gone Baby Gone in that they are both rooted in Malcolm Gladwell’s definition of good and bad as described in The Tipping Point. Affleck never defines his characters in absolute terms. When simply kicking around Charlestown, Doug may be more pleasant than Jem, but if you are a driver for an armored truck they hijack, you wouldn’t want to push your luck with neither one of them. When on a heist, both men are monsters (their grotesque masks become our literal interpretation of them) but to really understand who Doug is and who Jem it is necessary to see them without the masks.

            As such we are easily taken to Doug. Without our foreknowledge he seems like a decent guy, hard-working enough at his day job, struggling to make amends with his incarcerated father and the mother that left him when he was a child, and his feelings for Claire do seem sincere. Jem is far more vicious, but is he any less human? He honors his allegiance to his neighborhood (not only a reoccurring theme in Affleck’s movies but also his benchmark for evaluating someone’s respectability) and does his best for his sister (Blake Lively) and his little nephew, pushing Doug to fulfill his obligation to them. As awful as his crimes may be, they are born from his concern for his pals. It may be a relief to see Jem meet his end and, in the hands of a filmmaker interested primarily in shock value, that may well have been the pay-off. But Affleck is too thoughtful a director for easy emotions and cuts instead to the pained look on Doug’s face to remind us that our gut response to the death of this thug should not come so easily. Doug is, after all, watching someone who was, essentially, his brother, get gunned down by “the enemy”. On a certain level we have a classic tragedy, a fearless criminal goes down fighting; the only response he ever learned. That is the real tragedy of The Town, not Doug’s separation from Claire when he finally escapes Charlestown. At least in the theatrical cut, Doug’s saga ends triumphantly when he makes it out to the country (again shot in the soothing pastoral colors, contrasting sharply with the cold narrow streets of the city), haunted by the life he left behind in Boston.

            Further marring our cheer at the death of Jem is Affleck’s regard for the FBI. One of them, Dino (Titus Welliver, part of Affleck’s stock cast) committed the cardinal sin of the streets by ratting on his own people to rise to the top. From the perspective of Doug and his gang, and The Town (much like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Terrence Malik’s Badlands) invites us into this perspective without apology, Dino is less honorable than Doug’s father (Chris Cooper),  who is serving time for murdering two armored truck drivers during a heist gone bad but at least didn’t point fingers toward his associates and, in the words of Doug’s buddies, “went to jail with his head up.”

            Even the best of the FBI, Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm in a terrific performance) is, at the end of the day, a guy who wants to catch the bad guys so he can, as Doug puts it, “pump his supper.” The key words here are “bad guys”, but who are they really? A more accurate question is, who really are the good guys? Frawley does his job well, but neither he nor his colleagues are above bullying and coercion when the going gets tough. Still, we almost want Doug to walk into their trap at the end and we feel cheated, slightly, when Doug evades them.

            Affleck is as skilled at playing with his audience as anyone, constantly shifting our allegiance in rapid succession. The ending of The Town is no exception. When the FBI accepts defeat, recognizing they were duped by a criminal, the ending becomes decidedly anti-climactic, the bad guy got away. But given that he’s lost everything from Claire, to his family, and his lifestyle, Doug’s escape to the lake is a bittersweet ending at best.

            Affleck plays with perspective quite a bit, starting with the opening bank robbery. Typically, our gaze would be at eye-level with the hostages, the camera allowing us to share in the panic of the moment. But Affleck shows the action from the robbers’ viewpoint, making us partakers in the heist and, in a voyeuristic sense, complicit in the crime. In the now famous scene in which the hoods rob a bank in the North End wearing nun masks, the effect is even more taunting. We are put off by the gruesome disguises, the brutality of their crime (a loud guard gets shot), and their general nature. But then an interesting thing happens. After a savage chase with the police through the narrow streets of Boston’s North End, the robbers arrive at a construction site where their ridiculous disguises catch the suspicion of a police detail. Instantly, we change sides and hope they can still get away. We’ve seen them get away with so much already…

             This shifting of perspective may be Affleck’s strongest tool on his rise to auteur filmmaking. After all, his films take place in a world where villains and heroes don’t exist. His characters are defined as they relate to those around them, friend or foe. In The Town, even Claire evades easy labels. There is poignancy in her forgiveness of Doug after she learns of his true identity and there is something to be said for her loyalty to him, but she did have to work against the law to help him escape. She’s an admirable person in many ways. Recovering from her traumatic experience she continues to dedicate her time to the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club, a home for otherwise doomed inner-city kids of the sort Doug used to be. We can legitimately applaud her for donating the loot Doug leaves her to the restoration of the club’s ice rink, but it was stolen money.

            If there is pure evil in The Town it’s Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite in one of his last film appearances), the Irish mobster who has commanded the neighborhood crime ring for generations using a floral shop as a front. Because his crime extended to the people of the neighborhood (a twist we learn later), he is denied a dignified death.

            Though virtually no mention has been made of it, Hitchcock’s influence on Affleck is impossible to miss. Hitch loved to taunt the audience, most famously in Psycho but examples abound (including Dial M for Murder), and would often lead us right into the villain’s point-of-view before we even realized what the old master was doing. Hitch’s concept of suspense is also present in The Town. Look at how well mounted Doug and Claire’s encounter with Jem early in the film is. Jem’s tattoo (spotted by Claire during the kidnapping) could be a giveaway. The tension, however, is twofold. Can Claire identify Jem by the tattoo and, more complicated, do we want her to? If she does, what will that mean for Doug (who we are conflicted about in the first place) and, also, for her now that Jem has conclusive reason for fearing her? This is first-rate suspense of the sort Hitchcock loved. The tattoo dilemma blows over and ultimately amounts to little more than a McGuffin, but it creates a brilliant scene of discomfort for both Doug and Jem, the looks on their faces telling us exactly what they are thinking despite the words Claire hears them say. Doug knows that Jem knows who Claire is and that he feels betrayed by Doug romancing her. Doug knows he will have a lot to answer for (may be even to Claire if things play out that way) and the results may be explosive. Affleck keeps the dialogue tense and curt, keeping us in suspense about who will giveaway who until the scene fizzles out.

            As close to home as the material seems to have been for Affleck, he was not the first director on board when Graham King of Initial Entertainment Group brought the screenplay to Warner Bros. in 2006. Adapted from Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel Prince of Thieves, the screenplay was the work of Sheldon Turner and Adrian Lyne was slated to direct. But Turner’s script and Lyne’s vision were too long and too expensive for Warner, who was hoping to spend around the $37 million mark on the film.

            Inspired by the critical success of Gone Baby Gone and Affleck’s knowledge of the ways of life in Boston, Warner offered Affleck the project in 2008. He took it, however, with some hesitation, “I didn’t know how to direct somebody else’s movie. For better or worse, it had to be a movie that I personally researched and understood.”

            It is a bit surprising how slowly Affleck took to the project in its early stages, recounting his experience, “There was no inner smoothness for me. Fear and anxiety for me is a really good motivator. I’ve worked as hard as I’ve ever worked on anything, maybe harder, because failure wasn’t really an option.”

            What helped Affleck most was both the collaboration of the FBI and talks with the people of Charlestown.

            “We’d get 1,000 people to come in, and out of that there’d be like 20 interesting people whom I’d do follow-up interviews with,” he said. “That proved to be a gold mine in terms of material I could use.”

            Upon taking over the project, Affleck handed the screenplay over to childhood friend Aaron Stockard who had helped bring such a sense of authenticity to Gone Baby Gone, who also found the Townies’ stories useful for developing Doug and his gang, “These guys were really ballsy and brazen. It was exciting to know that we could write these characters big and ambitious, because they were.”

            Not all Townies were flattered by the film’s depiction of their home, however.

            “This is based on a book by a guy from Canton brought to the big screen by a guy from Cambridge,” grumbled hockey defenseman and Charlestown native Jack O’Callahan. “When they were younger, they wouldn’t have crossed the bridge. There was an element of crime. Everyone knew it. But it didn’t bleed into the neighborhood. And those guys were pretty good parents who went to church on Sundays. They were gangsters, but they were good neighbors. This bit with a bunch of guys in nun’s habits running around with machine guns, I don’t know where that happened.”

            Defense for Affleck, Chuck Hogan, and the film itself came from an unsurprising source, Dennis Lehane, whose novels have formed the basis of Boston’s representation on the screen with Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Affleck’s own Gone Baby Gone, was quick to say, “We’re crime writers. If it comes between the truth and the legend, you print the legend, what works dramatically. I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the impulse of why people say, ‘You’re painting us all this way’ just because you’re setting something in one part of town.”

            Affleck and Stockard finished reshaping the screenplay in less than a month, got Warner’s approval, and began shooting by August of 2009.

            “The first week of the shoot, the stress was, ‘How are we going to pull this off?’”, said producer Basil Iwanyk. “This is a big, intense, emotional movie, with a big cast, and Ben’s in Boston, where he’s being pulled in a million different directions. How do we communicate notes? How does he interact with department heads when he’s in the middle of a huge, intense acting scene? Ultimately, we realized all our fears were unfounded. He had consistent good cheer, was open, would talk to anyone, was able to compartmentalize his acting and his directing.”

            In the end, the biggest challenge was not the climactic shootout during the disastrous heist at Fenway Park, but a way to wrap up the movie, telling of Affleck’s emphasis on emotional impact over adrenaline.

            “We couldn’t figure out if we wanted to do a brutal ending like The Departed or a really emotional ending,” Iwanyk said. “We had endings where he died, and people hated it. Then we had endings where, while they weren’t holding hands you had the sense that they lived happily ever after and audiences felt cheated by it.”

            The official ending (an alternate one was included in the extended edition Blu-ray disc) was the best one, a graceful compromise between somberness and optimism, a perfect ending to the story of a wasted life redeemed by loyalty and honor.

            Affleck is fast earning a place in the auteur hall of fame, even in the smallest details like establishing a stock cast (such as Victor Garber, seen here briefly as a bank manager, who would have a prominent role in Affleck’s next picture Argo). With The Town he continues his winning streak and proves himself a sure hand artist for psychological thrills. He took bigger ambitions to Argo but still retained his themes of erasing bold lines between good and evil, albeit on a geopolitical scale. In doing so he continued his winning streak and came up with a superior international thriller with a lollapalooza of a climax.