Intelligent drama combining an engaging romance with a police investigation and a criminal gang's disenchantment with one another, culminating in a thoroughly competent piece.

Rating: 7/10 (16 March 2011)

Some extraordinary statistics greet us upon the beginning of Ben Affleck's film The Town, statistics more broadly linked to that of career choices those whom inhabit the film's set city of Boston are seemingly limited to. Specifically, if you're not a criminal or a thief or an armoured truck targeting bandit then there aren't many other things that you are. Like the lone monument, or cenotaph, which is the first image we see, standing tall amidst a sky full of clouds eerily rushing by, it is a career choice placed at the forefront of a sea of despair or despondency; a lifestyle perpetrated by a gloomy backdrop within which it seems there is precious little choice. Affleck's film is a studious observation on the limits a group of men face in this regard, a team of crooks who take down various instalments of cash held within banks and other such places connected to that of money exchange; people that are caught up in this city and this choice of life, again amidst a dank and unwelcoming backdrop of despair. The pillar appears as more than scant iconography, it is an item Affleck utilises and revisits on a number of occasions in the form of inserting it back into proceedings as characters progress and appear to want to escape onto something else; that monument coming and coming again as the insatiable force that is 'the life' drags our man backwards and backwards and back into the mire of it all.
Affleck here assumes the role of young Irish-American crook Doug MacRay; a young, pent-up but brutally methodical young heister with a father in prison, a mother, who he holds bittersweet memories of, whom is dead and is currently stuck in what is an unnurtured and unfulfilling relationship with a co-worker's sister named Krista (Lively). MacRay is involved in a crew with three others, one of which is Jeremy Renner's James Coughlin, of whom is the more sociopathic and violent of the group; a man whose credentials and legal situation in that he is a step away from serious penal related consequences is later verbally highlighted to us by the authorities. With Coughlin and MacRay is Albert Magloan (Slaine) and Desmond Elden (Burke), whom form the rest of the gang. Their jolting introduction is the robbing of a bank in masks and cloaks which typify evil in their demonic appearance; the preceding sequence as they go over things one final time complete with intense contingencies allowing for brief glances over one or two of the men as trepidation creeps sparingly over their faces and we're informed that here is a film not preoccupied with the slam-bang thrill of a robbery or a heist pertained by just anybody, but a group of men thinking and cultivating something through.
Ensuing complications during the opening sees English actress Rebecca Hall's bank employee Claire Keesey taken hostage, her frightful reaction to the F.B.I.'s questioning firmly establishing how deeply the experience affected her and as of the moment tags the crooks with an easy labelling of blind to all emotion, nameless, anonymous thugs without much due concern to others. The film goes some lengths to deconstruct this notion, a getting under of the proverbial skin and demythifying the gangsters whilst keeping all the police procedural stuff led by John Hamm's agent Adam Frawley deliberately quick; methodical; cold; metallic and emotionally lacking. As we come to bond more with MacRay, as he himself infiltrates Keesey's life on his crew's orders to check up on her problematic relationship in regards to them, we come to somewhat reverse our view to form more of an understanding with him; his life and their intimate bond. An early incident in their relationship sees MacRay utilise his criminal mindset to get one back on a group of hoodlums whom previously wronged Keesey, challenging us to get behind Affleck's character and exemplifying his disdain towards such people as officers of the law stay stuck on the back-burner going through the motions.
The film is rich in its finer things. Pete Postlethwaite delivers a stern and aggressive, in all the right ways, performance as local mob boss Fergus Colm, who has seen mostly everything and now works out of a florists. There is an affecting sub-plot to do with MacRay coming to tie up a bond with his father, who himself offers a further example of the film's demythification element when he confirms to our Doug that his mother was nary the proverbial angel he always saw her as - thus underpinning the film's core thesis. There is also a quite wonderful sequence between two characters, one overly violent and whose background at this point is occupied by deathly gravestones in a cemetery,; the other, having reiterated his desire to leave this life behind, shot to a backdrop of a community centre suggesting a straighter, more legitimate desire for a lifestyle possibly in which the helping of others features. Sadly, all appears lost and the brawling results in the would-be 'straighter' of the two men quite literally being dragged back to the 'side' of the nastier criminal: graveyard infused background et al.
People are surprised at the competence of director Ben Affleck, here doubling up as the co-screenwriter as well. Glancing back at Affleck's acting credits, the man has most certainly worked with some well known and rather well renowned directors of both his and our time; John Woo and Frankenheimer on some occasions, the likes of Gus van Sant, Martin Brest and, while there are many more people who admire him than I do, Kevin Smith on others. It's true to say that he hasn't necessarily caught the majority of these director's during either of their finest hours, or indeed worked with them on their best work, but if the man has observed and listened and formulated the ideas and methods that he's most probably put into practise for something such as The Town, then who's complaining?