As cool and straight an entertainment shot as his brother's recent directing debut was pyrotechnically scattered, Ben Affleck's The Town has got bangs, bucks and the kind of showy, signature roles aspiring actors pantomime themselves asleep to at night. The movie is as slick and tightly constructed as Affleck's debut, Gone Baby Gone, was prolix and unruly. But The Town lacks Gone's operatic ambitions. And the irony is that that lack of a grand or even grandiose plan keeps this very good film from being a truly great one.
The trackies are back, and so are the yawning townie accents. Instead of Dorchester we're in the failing Boston exurb of Charlestown, which has an almost quaint reputation as the bank robbery capital of the nation. It's a neighborhood built on an old school criminal economy: You grow up to be either a cop or a robber, and the line between the two is pretty thin.
Thirteen years ago Affleck and Matt Damon sat down to write a script, anxious to give themselves the breakout roles Hollywood had failed to supply. Swinging for the fences but determined to be true to themselves, they set it on their home turf of Boston, and Affleck's character especially embodied the class and generational anxieties that can stunt a city, and certainly the least advantaged of its citizens. Damon got the plum role in Good Will Hunting, and after deferring to his little brother Casey in his first film, here Affleck steps into the lead as Doug MacRay, the central character in Chuck Hogan's Prince of Thieves, the 2005 Hammett Prize winner The Town is based on, and the role of a Boston boy's dreams.
There's a pleasing, self-reflexive symmetry at work in Affleck's appropriation of a quintessential anti-hero like MacRay in his own film: MacRay and his crew -- comprising volatile right-hand Jem (Jeremy Renner), the stalwart Albert (Slaine), and the techie Desmond (Owen Burke) -- seem to be enacting a flamboyant gangster prophecy themselves. They commit their crimes in full, theatrical dress (in the opening scene they swish though a bank robbery in Grim Reaper burqas) and make constant, self-conscious references to cultural touchstones of crime procedurals and gangster swagger; even more than money the compulsion seems born of a lack of something better to do, or be.
For Doug especially, bank-busting feels like grim, reluctant work. Rather than ennobling or fatalizing crime as a way of life, Doug's inherited legacy (his father, played by Chris Cooper in a deft cameo, must "die five times" before he can get out of prison) is presented as an empty front. He'll put on the mask and go through the motions, but it's strictly an assumed identity; Affleck shoots each heist like the performance it is, complete with bullets that spray by the dozen but rarely seem to kill anyone.
Particularly in his interactions with Jem, recently sprung after nine years locked up and seething with purposeless energy, the disparity between their criminal personas -- and their level of commitment to them -- is a source of tension. A recovering addict working the program, Doug isn't a bred-in-the-bone thug, although that's what his peers want him to be, if only so he doesn't amount to anything better; what he does is often wrong, but he knows he's not bad. Jem, on the other hand, has rotted to his core. How he got that way only matters insofar as it suggests that it is possible for behavior to turn one's nature away from itself; is it only a matter of time before Doug's pile-up of wrongs overwhelm him?
Robbing a bank, for instance: probably not a great choice, though there are worse things he could do, as Jem's impulses helpfully point out. When Doug begins stalking and then wooing Claire (Rebecca Hall), the comely manager whom the masked quartet took as a hostage after robbing her bank, it's clearly the wrong decision, even if it prevents something bad (i.e., something Jem-related) from happening. It's also quite stupid, as Jem points out after discovering Doug dining with his new, secretly acquired girlfriend, and plays both of them like an Irish fiddle. Part of the film's thrilling first hour, the scene is a beautifully calibrated triumph for Affleck the director, and a tour de force for Renner, who seems to carry in his squat, springy frame and glowing eyes both the repulsion and the allure of someone truly, violently unpredictable.
"You've got a card," Doug tells Claire early on, playing dumb after she confesses that she has an identifying detail that she kept from the police. "You don't need to play it right away." My heart swelled a bit at that line (the novel was adapted by Affleck, Peter Craig, and Aaron Stockard for the screen) and its tantalizing suggestion of a smart, morally engaged, enigmatically self-aware tear through the heist genre. Hall, who as Claire radiates bland, girly goodness but also a measure of the self-preservation that her clueless, seduced witness counterpart in the recently TIFF-screened version of Brighton Rock lacked, is an outsider, and is initially used to telegraph the demographic flux that has set so many of the townie crews on edge. And yet that card of Claire's, along with most of the potential for an explosive second half that Affleck coils into the first, feels squandered; instead we get an imitation of a lesser, more literal shoot 'em up climax.
It's after a seriously awesome backstreet chase through some of Boston's narrow, urban corridors that the heists -- which become the focus instead of the backdrop to the perfectly serviceable primary story -- are subject to diminishing returns. Jon Hamm puts his G-Man genes to good use as FBI agent Adam Frawley, whose grudge against Doug's elite, elusive crew becomes personal, Pete Postlethwaite has a starved, awful potency as The Florist, an old world lynchpin to whom all Charlestown crews are in thrall, and Blake Lively has a couple of believably bleary moments as the designated trashy wild card with whom Doug has fathered a child.
While his actors are well used, Affleck makes the most of his big budget toys: Doug keeps agreeing to bigger and badder heists for reasons that make sense on the genre's terms but not the film's. By the time he's plotting to knock over Fenway Park, the narrative's energy slackens, though the action set pieces hum along on an independent generator. Affleck, whose features seem to have sharpened and settled into a kind of handsome, adult repose, offers a still but imposing, centering presence in a small, chaotic corner of a pretty tough world. I'm talking about Charlestown, though if he'd just play those cards right, I could see him sliding those big shoulders into the ranks of the Hollywood greats.