The Town

Review

Ben Affleck can look slack-faced and vague, like a moose in the klieg lights, but he’s remarkably present (for him) in the socko crime thriller The Town. He’s the director as well as the star, and his watchful intelligence comes through�that and his tenderness toward the actors in his care. It helps that Affleck’s character, a career armed robber named Doug MacRay, has reasons of his own to be watchful. After MacRay and his gang (wearing skull masks) pull off a brutal bank job, a single-minded FBI agent (Jon Hamm) begins to close in�at which point MacRay’s edgy partner, Jem (Jeremy Renner), wants to track down and terrorize the bank manager (Rebecca Hall) whom they’d briefly taken hostage. MacRay knows that Jem is apt to get carried away and eliminate this one loose end, so he insists on threatening the woman himself, which he doesn’t get around to doing, on account of his falling in love with her. Will she find out he was the one with the gun to her head? Awkward.

The plot is Hollywood hokum, but the movie is called The Town rather than Prince of Thieves, the title of the Chuck Hogan novel on which it’s based, and Affleck makes the place the true protagonist; he treats its tribal customs with an anthropologist’s awe. The setting is predominantly Charlestown, a mile-long Boston neighborhood with a tradition of blue-collar crime, passed down like a trade, we’re told in the opening titles, from father to son. Affleck and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, bring out the strangeness of its layout between the Charles and, yes, Mystic Rivers, as exposed and yet remote as Alcatraz, the Bunker Hill Monument rising impassively over its impenetrable neighborhoods. In an age in which so many films and TV shows are shot, for reasons of economy, in Toronto and Vancouver (standing in for Everycity), the movie’s rootedness is bracing.

Affleck is no lug when it comes to action, either. The camera bursts into the bank behind the robbers, swerving and whipping around as they smash past the teller desks and scream for the employees to hit the floor. Then we see the view through the security camera: black and white, stationary, dead silent. It’s a gimmicky transition�but a neat one! The skull masks are genius: They bring out the robbers’ otherness, their ghoulish lineage. But as Hall’s Claire fumbles with the safe, too terrified to get the combination right, something human slips out from behind MacRay’s bogeyman visage. �Take your time,� he says. �Breathe.� You half-expect him to give her a shoulder massage. The nearly six-foot Hall uses her size to express instability; she’s so endearingly vulnerable that you know why MacRay wants to protect her. Later, when she meets him in a laundromat and tells him about her ordeal, he has to work to keep her interests from outweighing his own.

The lovable armed robber is, of course, a sentimental conceit, but Renner keeps the film from going soft. I can’t think of an actor who does less �indicating��i.e., showing instead of living it. In The Hurt Locker, he didn’t act the hot-dog bomb expert. He just strode toward a bomb as if he needed to defuse it to complete himself. In The Town, he doesn’t signal that Jem is a sociopath. He’s just a man who has to hurt people to maintain his sense of control. We can feel his drive toward destruction; we know he won’t, can’t forget about Claire and the threat to his sense of order. It’s a deeply unnerving performance, beyond good or evil.

Everyone in The Town shines, even Blake Lively, but it’s Chris Cooper as MacRay’s imprisoned dad who astounds. The performance is hard, almost completely internal, with the barest hint of disgust at his son’s credulity. This is Jon Hamm’s first meaty movie role since embodying�incomparably�one of the most conflicted characters in the history of television. On one hand, it’s disappointing that his FBI agent, Frawley, does little besides bark orders, stare down suspects, and lead his team in gun battles. On the other hand, his handsomeness comes through vividly on the big screen. And it’s good to see him off the booze!

The Town has its ding-a-ling touches, like Claire volunteering in a rec center for poor kids (how sweet), and a buried secret involving MacRay’s absent mom, and a final battle so overscaled it’s like War of the Worlds in Fenway Park. The denouement is a mistake. But it’s great to see actors go to (the) town. — David Edelstein

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• David Edelstein's Full Review (9/20/10)