Contrived, Hackneyed, Schmaltzy, Conventional, Spectacularly Entertaining

Rating: 7/10 (21 October 2010)

There are certain scenes in The Town that skillfully use the psychological commands we insistently hurl at movie characters. For instance, Ben Affleck's fond of Rebecca Hall. If she sees the tattoo on the back of Renner's neck, she'd find out something she can't find out about him. Jeremy Renner without warning meets the two at a counter. With firm looks and behavior, Affleck hints at him to leave. We do, too. Renner aggressively loiters. He doesn't know the tattoo's a tell. If a film can carry us to this situation and make us feel angst, it's done something correctly. Nevertheless, the dialogue so often feels forced, especially in the film's mid-section. John Hamm is given many lines that act more as self-conscious metaphors and similes---"This isn't Tommy Hopscotch anymore," or "This is the not-effing-around crew so get me something that looks like a print because this not-effing-around thing is about to go both ways"---than as steps to create tension or reveal character. Affleck's alternately somber and confrontational monologues are either too affected to be taken seriously or they're beautifully written and delivered but nevertheless not motivated enough to feel any more than contrived, just as much of the plot is.
The Town opens by directly informing us that Charlestown breeds more bank robbers than anywhere else in the entire world. But rather than showing us real people, we're given crime drama stereotypes, in thrall to a mawkishly sentimental formula. Affleck is the leader of the heist crew with a heart and a burdened conscience who becomes romantically linked with an idealized female figure of innocence, played by Hall, whose personal life seems to only be comprised of volunteering to help children and do earnest day-to-day activities, all purely incidental in order to serve Affleck's character arc. She doesn't seem to have a life of her own at all. The crew's second banana is Renner's unhinged, trigger-happy urban barbarian with an insular sense of honor among criminals. The crew is comprised of two other neighborhood guys as well, but we're given nothing about them at all. We see them intermingle, we see the foursome masked while performing spectacular robberies, but nothing that ultimately happens to these other two matters. They work for Pete Postlethwaite, the emblematic neighborhood old-timer who keeps the subsequent generation's angry young men bound to the eponymous segregated populist environment to do his dirty work.
But The Town is not a bad film. It may be hackneyed, schmaltzy and conventional, but as Ebert once intelligently observed, what makes a movie good is not what it's about but how it's about it. It's certainly not as gritty as its opening words oblige, nor is it exceptional as a crime drama unattached to those words about Charlestown, but don't we watch those gangster films from the 1930s and '40s with the same trite, ham-handed and forcibly conformist scripts, Cagney, Bogart and Robinson spouting the same artificially prosey lines, and enjoy them to the point of rapture? Nostalgia, right? Well that's just what Affleck is going for with The Town: An atmospherically nostalgic, sentimentally driven elegy to the narrow streets of Boston. And in that subjective milieu, it's a very absorbing, highly adventurous entertainment.
Something else that observant movie buffs admire about silver-screen gangster classics, but regard less about more modern films with the same dramatic tackiness listed above, is the technical structure. As over-the-top and ham-handed as White Heat, High Sierra and the great original Scarface are, especially by modern standards, they're shot, edited and directed with more than a deft hand for tension and brutal in-the-moment action. So is Affleck's The Town. For the first half hour, it's edited with a particular, emotional and suspenseful edge that not many romantic Hollywood films are. Of the many impacts provided by the overtonal and associational cutting is its dropping of us, the audience, straight into the initial dilemma of the story. And as the film progresses, there is the occasional suggestive use of editing, not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmic characteristics, but to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from cutting simply based on the length of a shot or the literal connection from one situation to the next.
The most spectacular entertainment to extract from the movie in terms of narrative are certainly the heists, their getaways and repercussions. The robbery sequences themselves pull few punches. I've often wondered what security guards, law enforcement, bank employees and the like think and feel when faced with films like Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job. Are they especially detached from the exhilarating spectacle of a witty machination like that, or do they sometimes actually resent the sugar-coated treatment of the sort of experience they've either had or fear to have? The Town is one of those heist films that maintain both the rush of a good movie heist sequence and the ferocity of the armed robbery of an establishment.