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Does Ben Affleck’s The Town Effectively Balance Its Bang-Bangs and Kiss-Kisses?

No one can say the f-word quite like a Bostonian. Forget New York, Chicago, or even the cockney bullies of Guy Richie’s London. In Boston, the f-word pops from the lips, lilts and rises like perfect pizza dough. It mocks, spars, and attacks, always with the hint of wit and a wry sense of irony. Friends and enemies alike are subject to the same barrage of verbal abuse. Repeat it over and over, as it is in Ben Affleck’s bank heist thriller, The Town, and the f-word has its own beautiful resonance. Pair it with the colorful, albeit limited, vocabulary of New England insults, provocations, and other swears, and you have a vocal bouquet with a colloquial charm that wins your affection. The language and banter of the Irish, working class gangsters in The Town is what draws us into this well-crafted and exciting chase and shoot thriller, a movie built on the foundation of its appealing characters. Sure, The Town’s setup is conventional, and its central drama, a love story between the bank robbing mastermind and a hostage, is as familiar as primetime crime drama. But give second-time director Ben Affleck credit. He understands that the only trick a good movie needs to play is to create a character on screen you care about and action thrilling enough to keep you interested.
By Peter Simek |
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No one can say the f-word quite like a Bostonian. Forget New York, Chicago, or even the cockney bullies of Guy Ritchie’s London. In Boston, the f-word pops from the lips, lilts and rises like perfect pizza dough. It mocks, spars, and attacks, always with the hint of wit and a wry sense of irony. Friends and enemies alike are subject to the same barrage of verbal abuse. Repeat it over and over, as is done in Ben Affleck’s bank heist thriller, The Town, and the f-word has its own beautiful resonance. Pair it with the colorful, albeit limited, vocabulary of New England insults, provocations, and other swears, and you have a vocal bouquet with a colloquial charm that wins your affection.

The language and banter of the Irish working-class gangsters in The Town is what draws us into this well-crafted and exciting chase-and-shoot thriller, a movie built on the foundation of its appealing characters. Sure, The Town’s setup is conventional, and its central drama, a love story between the bank robbing mastermind and a hostage, is as familiar as primetime crime drama. But give second-time director Ben Affleck credit. He understands that the only trick a good movie needs to play is to create a character on screen that you care about and action thrilling enough to keep you interested.

Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the brains behind a four-man crew that has held up numerous banks and armored cars around Boston. MacRay has a back story. His mother left him when he was 6. His dad was a two-bit gangster who is now serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary. MacRay was a star hockey player, who was drafted by an NHL team, but was eventually cut after drugs, drinking, and the other vices of Charlestown caught up with him.

The Charlestown neighborhood of Boston looms over the drama in The Town. Its colonial-style row houses are both quaint and drab, and the juxtaposition of gentrifying yuppies and old neighborhood Irish provides an underlying tension. The tension boils over in the film’s rougher characters. Doug’s best friend and partner in crime, James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), is jovial, loyal, ruthless, and unpredictable. His vicious streak is established in the film’s first heist, during which James randomly beats in the face of a bank manager with the butt of his gun. After a bank alarm goes off, James grabs a female bank manager as a hostage. Nothing becomes of the brief kidnapping. The woman, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) is let loose, but James decides that as the key witness of the robbery, she needs to be “dealt with.” Doug begins to follow her, and after an encounter in a Laundromat, the unlikely couple begins to date.

The Town is a movie with two faces, just as Doug’s character is split. Doug is a compassionate, likeable fellow, and with Claire, he is charming and personable. Growing up in a world of gangsters, he is of “the town,” but he wants to get away. He dreams of packing up and moving to Florida with Claire, finding companionship, and retiring from violence.

The second face is that of the heists. They are fast-pasted, imaginative, and virile. Afleck does a good job of balancing action with the love story, a feat he achieves through paying careful attention to establishing the world of The Town. Bit parts are fleshed-out, family histories are carefully established, and the smart, speedy dialogue breathes the Harbor air. The action evolves seamlessly into a game of cat and mouse between Doug and FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), and as Frawley closes in, The Town becomes a movie about the way family and community haunt our character, with an intriguing moral catch. For Doug, escaping from the penalty of the law means finally realizing an honest life. He’s just got to shoot his way out first. How do you not root for the mahtha effer?

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

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