Review: The Town
The Town is Ben Affleck’s second cop drama set against the backdrop of the working class Irish burbs of Boston and, as with Gone Baby Gone (“I hate movies with twists,” was my boyfriend’s succinct evaluation), Affleck has put a gritty setting at the service of tricky, slick plotting with mixed results.
The Affleck behind the lens appears to have a sincere desire to depict the lives and stories of the working poor of Boston: he revels in their particular faces, families, children, accents, houses, laneways, dive bars and (apparently) explosive criminal sagas. Instead of using extras, he has often shot scenes in the middle of the local street life of his neighbourhood settings, giving his films a verité surface. To his credit, The Town is visualised well: the photography is excellent; the editing cracking; a mass of detail is effortlessly assembled through the action sequences and deftly deployed into a coherent flow.
Too bad then that Affleck’s verité aspirations have to conflict with such a generic story. If I thought Affleck was only aspiring to pulp fiction, I wouldn’t mind the cardboard cut-out characters and neat endings all tied up with a bow. This tale of a bank robber who indulges in a romantic fantasy of escape would function fine as a very stylish pulpy pot boiler. But as it is, the story is just screaming out for a good meddling writer to rearrange some of the elements and endings. It comes so close to being interesting but falls just short, settling too often for easy go-to conflicts and resolutions (including bad mothers, mad brothers and the transformative power of romantic love) and avoiding the more inherently interesting but unexplored avenues they could’ve gone down. For example, our hero (played by Affleck) is carefully constructed as a “nice guy” criminal. His bullets never land their mark, keeping him unsullied by actual violence. So charming is he, that when he casually dismisses the possibility of being responsible for the paternity of his long-time junky girlfriend’s child (without actually being sure) this irresponsible and weak response is glossed over and unexamined. Wouldn’t a nice guy want to know for sure, I found myself wondering later? Instead, he, and we, are allowed to escape further into this neatly edited fantasy of a criminal’s redemption.
Further, the Boston Irish depicted here (the most believable element in the film by far) are just stand-ins for any number of colourful backdrops deployed in countless police dramas: the ghetto, Joysey, Little Italy, the waterfront. It’s just a different flavour of grit, an aesthetic choice. Failing to get under the skin of these people, and relying too much on cliché renders their role tokenistic, and their depiction potentially exploitative.
