THE TOWN 2 1/2 stars
Warner Bros, Rated R
At least two films opening right now are directed by actors starring in their own movies—Ben Affleck’s The Town and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jack Goes Boating. And while actors directing themselves is not exactly the same as writing their own reviews, that dubious notion of self-criticism—or more likely the lack of it—can come pretty inadvisably close.
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When comparing the two productions, The Town would seem to be less ego driven, with Affleck deferring to story and action over personality, and with the thematic distinction that while Hoffman prefers to go boating, Affleck goes bank robbing—with a vengeance and then some.
The Town is adapted from the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves but stakes its narrative in the claim of 300 bank robberies in Boston every year and Charlestown, the Beantown neighborhood where the film is set, as a tiny turf producing more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country.
Affleck is Doug MacRay, one of those hotshot bank robbers who pulls off rather creatively conceived heists involving elaborate disguises. Whether disguising himself and his fellow crooks in cadaver costumes, as pretend cops in shades or as masked nuns with guns, these co-conspirators are less Bonnie and Clyde than the Addams family.
When one bank hit gets a little chaotic, the gang grabs manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) as temporary hostage for a secure getaway, then dumps her on a beach later. But when Doug runs into her at the local laundromat, he’s instantly smitten, in a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome. What starts out as surveillance in the guise of pretend dating to keep tabs on Claire’s meetings with FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) soon blossoms into cross-cultural romance. This leads Doug to develop a serious urge to part ways with his neighborhood roots, including dumping his childhood sweetheart Krista (Blake Lively), a lanky, gum-chewing tattooed barfly, and leaving behind his best buddy, her homicidal maniac brother Jem (Jeremy Renner).
Ben Affleck (L.) and Jeremy Renner star in The Town
Of course Doug’s break with this long-cultivated surrogate family is a predestined no-brainer, given their unappealing caricatured personalities in contrast to the cultivated and refined alluring bank manager. Affleck had the good sense to step aside and let Renner flaunt his on-screen psychopathic gift for killing people with relish, an impressively stylish stunt with scary intimations of James Cagney.
But Affleck, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is clearly into the more fairy tale-leaning side of this story. Namely, the class conceit of the prince in question, as a determined makeover from the frogs—or rather, thieves—on the crude lower rung of the food chain, rising up in aspiration to the supposedly more elegant and ethical middle class, as represented in the film by the yuppies invading and gentrifying the once solidly blue collar Irish neighborhood. While he has perfected a gift for breathlessly paced action and suspense in a crime thriller, the story of a well-heeled female financial maven falling for a construction worker, or vice versa, is best left to the stuff of satire.
