BEN AFFLECK AND JEREMY RENNER IN THE TOWN

The importance of hiding who you are

In his second outing as a director, again developed from a crime novel set in poor white Boston, Ben Affleck has made himself the protagonist instead of his brother Casey, the arrestingly oddball star of his debut Gone Baby Gone. The neighborhood is Charlestown instead of Dorchester. The novelist is Chuck Hogan instead of Denis Lehane. A strong, lantern-jawed leading man replaces the dodgy lightweight. The new movie is flashier, faster, and more conventional than its predecessor. Gone Baby Gone didn't quite work as a movie -- it had little momentum -- but was fascinating for its exploration of psychology and milieu. The Town is a disappointment in those departments, though it's got much more action of the violent, cops-and-robbers kind. Affleck is still trying hard and may yet make it as a director running on all four cylinders. As a leading man here, he captures that sense of a guy who has messed up and wants to set things right -- the emotional memory that he's seemed to draw on since the JayLo days. But he's not ready to play with the big boys yet. Clint Eastwood's Lehane adaptation Mystic River had its problems, but neither of Affleck's movies can match it for scale and depth -- complexity of characters, intensity of action, and richly evoked Boston milieu. And Clint didn't even grow up in Boston. But let's not forget, the Affleck boys didn't either. They were raised in Cambridge, by a school teacher and a social worker.

But these guys in The Town are tough boys. Charlestown, we're told, is, or was, the national capital for bank robberies. Doug MacRay (Affleck) and his three homeboy partners are aces at knocking over armored cars, and have done a few banks. The movie begins with a noisy, messy bank heist. At this point it's hard not to compare and contrast John Luessenhop's current movie Takers. Same deal, only The Town is an earnest movie, Takers a stylish one. Takers features thieves who are mostly elegant and black, and the big robbery that opens their movie is so flashy it ends with hijaking a TV press crew copter. The sartorial habits and leisure activities of Doug and his boys are perhaps better ignored. They get the job done, but at a cost. They wind up taking young bank VP Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage to keep anyone from reporting the robbery too soon. Claire is, of course, traumatized by her brief captivity but doesn't ID her momentary captors. Their faces were hidden behind rubber death masks -- and heavy-duty ethnic Boston accents; but the accents wind up seeming pretty irrelevant. ( If you want a deeply ethnic family of thieves, with lingo you can cut with a knife and an intensity of character and relationship this movie can't match, go to another current movie, Australian David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.)

After the opening heist comes a surprise twist that dominates the rest of the narrative: Doug, leader of the robbers, meets Claire, the hostage, in a laundromat, and they begin dating. Enemies turned into lovers, unbeknownst to one. The relationship between the star-crossed Doug and Claire has obvious class overtones. Claire's a "toonie," a yuppie-ish outsider. Doug's origins are grimly Charlestown: his ma was a runaway drug addict and his dad's a jailbird. But these social distinctions are trumped by the huge lie Doug is perpetrating in hiding who he is from Claire.

This tricky romance might have been more suspenseful and more emotionally rich. Maybe it is in Chuck Hogan's novel (which won a crime writing prize, by the way). But in Affleck's screen adaptation, co-authored by Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, Doug and Claire must share major screen time with FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm, a little too familiar to fans of "Mad Men"). Frawley is rapidly zeroing in on Doug & Co.'s chain of local robberies.

Affleck's earnest performance is also trumped by the casting of brilliant character actors in secondary roles. Chris Cooper plays Doug's jailbird dad. His few words to his son during a short prison visit project more depth than anybody else. Jeremy Renner, a little too familiar from Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker, projects a coiled violence that makes you wonder if Doug's on the same team; his Jem's the homeboy brother from hell. He did nine years in prison to protect the others, and wields this obligation to lock Doug into the crime team. Pete Postlethwaite, another acting veteran, is ominously evil as the boys' local mastermind Fergus 'Fergie' Colm, an Irish petty gangster who runs a drug trade and masterminds the robberies behind the front of a small florist shop. All these people tend to outweigh the doomed romance. But in the end all the fancy acting is still no match for the real life barflies Ben Affleck used so effectively to thicken the atmosphere of Gone Baby Gone.

Here again, as in the latter film, the moral and social issues arise in schematic terms. Are the principals absolved because their origins have doomed and trapped them -- or are they guilty as (original) sin? There's much less time for meditating on these questions this time, though, because there are several more heists, including the One Last Big One Fergie foists upon the men as if to punish Doug for wanting to get clean (he's already a Twelve-Stepper) and go somewhere new, with Claire, who's willing. (That she is seemingly adrift too is another thing that makes their class differences without much point in the story.)

Ultimately the aspect of The Town that may remain in the memory most strongly is how it stresses the importance of disguise. The death masks are traded for nun and wimple costumes and then police uniforms, and Doug is hiding behind a working class exterior when he's a second or third generation criminal. The robbers have job covers they use as alibis, and one uses experience at Verizon to disarm security systems. Finally, the protagonist walks away unnoticed, hidden in plain view. It's a nice metaphor for the invisibility of poverty and underclass origins. But somehow Affleck has gotten better at the mainstream pleasures of actioners only to sidestep the skills he showed earlier at telling a story with social and emotional depth.

Other elements are curiously lacking too. The music by David Buckley and Harry Gregson-Williams is conventionally thumpy at tense moments. The cinematography by Robert Elswit, Paul Thomas Anderson's d.p., is harsh and ugly, many miles from the glories of Let their Be Blood. Of course it's no mean feat to co-write, direct, and star in a movie. Certainly the long final robbery sequence, where the four robbers are following Fergie's grandiose command to "take down the cathedral of Boston," the Red Sox's Fenway Park, is full of complicated stuff and before that there's a desperate car chase that defies all reason in yet another new movie way. But the wistfully feel-good ending leaves you hungry, and the special tone Ben Affleck captured in Gone Baby Gone is -- gone, baby.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.