The Town

Ben Affleck is a great director.

Not good, not promising. Great. And while we’re at the list of things I didn’t think I would ever say.

Ben Affleck is a fucking badass.

But we’ll get to that later. I knew I liked, perhaps even loved Affleck as a director going into The Town. But it was something I knew on a detached intellectual level. As the record states I hold Gone Baby Gone in the highest possible regard. But it was something I knew only on an intellectual level. Some part of me was still expecting the star of Jersey Girl and Gigli to be a flash in the pan. To prove to be the big dumb lug who wasted his modest talent starring in one of the biggest runs of dreck on record from a major star from 1998 to 2006. But low and behold The Town not only lives up to high bar set by Gone Baby Gone, it clears it. Because while half of Gone Baby Gone’s success can be layed at the feet of its superlative source material, The Town took a mediocre airport crime thriller and somehow turned it into the greatest crime film since Heat.

This film should be taught in classes as the gold standard of how to adapt a book to film.

He slashes the distracting and cheesy love triangle that lay like a poison pill at the novel’s center, exponentially strengthening the film’s two core relationships in the process, gives real heart to the conflict at the center of the film, and really nails our hero in a beat that the novel lets him completely off the hook for.

In short he took a book that was by the numbers and made it thrum with real passion. Took the flaccid robberies and soaked them with adreniline, including a ridiculously prolonged car chase, that for my money surpasses the running gun battle in Heat. One that ends with a beat so perfect I wanted to cheer.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Town thrives on the clichés of “The Criminal pulling one last job.” And “The bad man redeemed by the good woman.” The difference is that unlike Hogan Affleck turns them into grand archetypes, while still keeping them true to life.

Part of what crippled Prince Of Thieves is that Chuck Hogan cannot write women to save his life. If the woman’s not a vengeful harpy, she’s a blank slate who will probably end up “in the fridge” so to speak. This is problematic when you base the entire crux of your narrative around the fact that a woman is so wonderful that no one doesn’t want to love her, protect her, or kill her, and said woman as written is kind of a narcissistic drip. Its like he came up with Bella five years early.

Affleck cannily solves the problem by having only himself fall for her, thus eliminating a good 75% of the cheesy ridiculous inherent in the “Cop and Crook fight for love!! And The Street!” Inherent in the book. And thanks to Hall’s performance, it’s possible to see what someone would actually see in her. This also ramps up the vehemence between Hamm and Affleck, culminating in a scene that soaks in gasoline and lights afire fifteen years of “Cop and Criminal share grudging respect” perpetuated by Heat, in about two minutes.

It's just one piece of the movie’s crackingly dialogue (“Whose car we gonna take?”) credited to Affleck and Peter Craig. I’ll say it now. If The Town isn’t the best film I’ve seen this year, it’s the certainly best written.

And its here that Affleck’s talent really lies. He has an eye for composition, and a definite sense of energy. But it’s his writer’s ear for dialogue and his actor’s sense of timing, coupled with an uncommonly good eye for casting that keep his film’s thrumming with such unique energy.

Like Gone Baby Gone, he casts the film with lots of local color including Slaine who if there’s any justice in the world get a shit load of character work for his turn here as Gloansy. When there’s a short scene in an AA meeting, it populated with folks who look like they actually belong at AA meetings. He also gets good use out of Hamm pure masculine righteous menace. Renner, bringing the character a charisma not in the text. Hall as mentioned does fine work in a crucial role. Chris Cooper knocks it out of the park with a one scene roll. And Pete Postelthwaite horrifies as a profound figure of moral and physical rot.

It was Affleck’s final confrontation with Postlethwaite that convinced me that no matter how silly he looked in Daredevil, Ben Affleck was a bonafide badass. And it made me recall another Badass who American filmmakers didn’t know how to handle in his youth. Yes it's be premature to compare Affleck to Eastwood. I know that. And I know he has to make something like The Beguiled or Bird before he can really claim that right. But if he keeps making movies like this, I see no reason why he couldn’t be. I’d certainly hold The Town in as high regard in the badass cinema pantheon as The Outlaw Josey Welles.

Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 6: Gone Baby Gone

(Previous Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something were part of a Film Noir and then Neo Noir series that I was asked to help program and host. Starting with this entry, I am now the sole programmer, and the films will no longer be just crime films. Once again this is written for speech so I apologize for any irregularities of cadence)

(I'm not going to lie its been pretty f-ing cool seeing these around town)

Dennis Lehane has gotten unusually lucky with his adaptations. Clint Eastwood did a fine job bringing his Mystic River to the screen, and just this year Scorsese delivered a fantastic adaptation of his Shutter Island. And yet I’d argue that out of those rather heavy hitting directors Ben Affleck has done the best job of bringing Lehane’s singular tone to the screen.

Unlike the other films made from his work, Gone Baby Gone is an adaptation of one of the Kenzie and Genarro books that make up the core of Lehane’s fiction. The five novels follow the two private eyes through the Boston underworld with a uniqueness of both setting and character that manages to set them apart from the glut of Private Eye novels.

Patrick Kenzie isn’t a bruised white knight like Phillip Marlowe. He’s not a smooth operator like Dashell Hammet’s continental op. Nor is he even a particular brilliant detective. He’s a smartass, whose managed to keep his good heart despite all the evidence the world has shown him. Casey Affleck gives nepotism a good name, bringing him to life with all of his conflict and wit intact. As does Michelle Monaghan as Genaro. Though if the film has a flaw its that its more of a Kenzie film. Mostly for narrative reason’s a slight change is made to series mythology and Genarro is made something of an outsider, so there’s someone there to have exposition delivered to. The problem is that it ends up making her feel a little less then a full on partner and sidelines her for far too much of the runtime.

On the whole though casting is one of the film’s strongest suits. Ed Harris gives one of his strongest performances in years, Morgan Freeman playing not so much against type but to it gives a great twist on his normal persona, Amy Ryan gives a career best performance. And perhaps most gratifyingly the under used Amy Madigan finally gets a role to sink her teeth into. Much of the rest of the cast is filled out by natives, which lends the film a realism that makes other gritty Boston crime films like The Departed, feel glamorized. No matter how intense Scorsese got, when you see an old man smoking through his tracheotomy is the type of image that you don’t get from central casting.

Most of these novels aren’t “who dunnits”. That’s not to say that Lehane doesn’t write some excellent mysteries into them. But the center of the books are always around a moral question. The question at the heart of each Dennis Lehane novel isn’t “Who kidnapped the heiress?” Or “Who has the money” but “How can I wake up and look at myself in the mirror?”

The fact that Ben Affleck has the talent, or even the inclination to address such a question may be surprising to those who know him best as the dopey would be matinee idol he was at the beginning of the decade, and not the talented character actor he has proven himself to be before and afterwards. It’d be easy enough to credit this to the fact that Affleck grew up in the neighborhoods and around the people that Lehane writes about. His familiarity and eye for people certainly adds a certain lived in feel to the film and his second film The Town coming out in a couple of weeks, returns him to this comfortable territory. But that’s certainly not the only thing Affleck brings to the table. Without giving away too much of the plot, there are scenes in here that could come out from a horror film, and scenes that could come out of a buddy comedy, and the way Affleck is able to juggle these tones both the grotesque and the light proves him to be a versatile skilled director. Though his next film The Town is based upon a much weaker novel, I’m looking forward to seeing what Affleck can do with it.

While this is the most recent film that we’ve shown so far in this series, Gone Baby Gone feels like a film from a different era. It’d be easy to imagine it as a lost film of the seventies from someone like Michael Ritchie or William Friedkin. It’s a dark film that asks hard questions and doesn’t bother with easy answers. In other words it treats it’s audience like adults. And a filmmaker whose willing to do that is a valuable one indeed.

This is a dark film, but its an honest one.