Ben Affleck has had a strange career. He’s best known for starring in a series of big-budget and typically low-quality blockbusters—“Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor”—but some of his greatest acclaim, and his only Oscar, came for writing the screenplay for 1997’s “Good Will Hunting.” He also shocked everyone, myself included, when “Gone Baby Gone,” his directorial debut, was not just good but really good: a smart, involving thriller that hauntingly explored Boston’s seedy lowlife and featured one of the best performances of the decade from Amy Ryan. Now Affleck is back with his sophomore feature “The Town,” and, lo and behold, it’s also good—not as good as “Gone Baby Gone,” but enough to prove that, after 10 years of lifeless performances, he actually has talent.
The plot, in brief: Affleck stars as Doug McRay, a bank robber from the Charlestown district of Boston who begins to question his lifestyle when he falls in love with Claire, a hostage he took during one of his heists. It’s nothing profoundly original, but the script has enough plot turns to keep the pace moving quickly, and Affleck turns out to be a surprisingly good director of action, making the robbery/getaway sequences not only tense and exciting but also clean and clear, not the typical muddle of shaky-cam and quick cuts we often get in action movies.
The acting is also superb. The always-excellent Rebecca Hall has to show the greatest emotional range in her role as Claire, and she absolutely nails every scene she gets. Jeremy Renner is fantastic as McRay’s violent, short-tempered, and probably psychotic best friend, as is Jon Hamm, who does everything he can with what’s otherwise your typical tough, wise-cracking cop. Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper, and even Blake Lively are also great in smaller roles. And as for Affleck, he might actually give his best performance to date, although that’s not saying a lot: He does a serviceable job in most of his scenes—charming Claire, planning out jobs with his crew—but when the movie gets nearer to the climax and the stakes and tension start ratcheting up, he doesn’t hang on quite as well as the rest of the cast. His calm, understated delivery really only takes him so far, and he’s never able to show us much emotional depth or dimensionality to McRay’s character.
My biggest problem with “The Town,” though, is that once you get past the cops-and-robbers fun, there’s really not a lot there. The clearest thematic statement seems to be that the life of crime isn’t good, which I probably could’ve figured out without Ben Affleck’s help. The movie also tries to bring up the issue of whether or not a person can change their life, but it fails to really get into the idea in anything more than a shallow and perfunctory way: The movie’s primary intention is clearly to entertain, not to enlighten.
And it does entertain—there’s no doubt about that, even if it won’t stick with you much afterwards. It’s neither as good as nor as ambitious as Affleck’s last picture, which could be a bad sign for his future—there are only so many gritty Boston crime movies he can make if he doesn’t start stretching himself—but it’s enough to confirm my suspicion that he could have made much better movies if he’d stayed behind the camera.
