Skip to main contentYou know a movie has a wicked sick codependency with the city of Boston when it culminates with a robbery of Fenway Park. The Town's climactic heist—probably the first time Ben Affleck has snuck into a Red Sox game incognito—is every Massachusetts townie's fever-pitch dream, with machine-gun fire spattering across the stadium's green-painted concrete pillars. But the movie suggests, at least as much as did Affleck's last directing entry, Gone Baby Gone, that Beantown loyalty is something like a disease of inbreeding. The town in question is Charlestown (it's what some folks like to call a rough neighborhood), and the picture opens with a quote from a local, printed in the Boston Globe: "I'm proud to be from Charlestown. It ruined my life, literally, but I'm proud." Yankees suck! Yankees suck!
Affleck stars, as the heir to a bank-stickup dynasty, and if he isn't quite the magnetic firecracker that his brother Casey was in Gone Baby Gone, he is still no slouch at the set-jaw school of romantic antihero. As a director, he directs a lean gunfight (and is good at establishing the longshot logistics of each robbery), and deserves credit for casting other actors who he must know will upstage him. The movie is a hard-case showcase. Jeremy Renner, coming off his Oscar nomination for The Hurt Locker, nestles into a rodential role as Affleck's partner, who finds his own sociopathy entirely satisfying; he gets a terrific exit. As an FBI nemesis, Jon Hamm (Mad Men's Don Draper) works very hard at the kind of decent ruthlessness Sterling Hayden used to turn in casually; his efforts pay off more than I had hoped. Chris Cooper's cameo as Affleck's jailbird dad is exactly up to high expectations (whetted by his first appearance in a suspect chart), while Pete Postlethwaite has whittled himself down to uncut, beady-eyed malevolence—I actually found my interest in the action doubled by hating his villain so much.
The ladies fare less happily. Blake Lively of Gossip Girl is nearly unrecognizable as a troubled drug mule, and that's probably just as well. Rebecca Hall does better with her role, but it's a terrible role, a hoary contrivance, and The Town threatens to collapse around it: We're supposed to believe that Affleck is madly enraptured with a bank teller who can finger him to the feds, and I'm sorry, but no. (The script seems aware of this void in Chuck Hogan's source novel, and is even a little sheepish about it: "Let's start fucking all the witnesses!" Renner snarls indignantly.) It may be a measure of Affleck's bleak vision of Charlestown that the means of escape feels so unpersuasive. Love is not civically proud. R.
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opens Friday at Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville.
WWeek 2015