The Town is a great crime film. Like all action flicks of its ilk, this one works primarily because it enacts certain cultural fantasies: robbing banks, shooting cops, outrunning the Feds, using and seducing women, fighting friends, beating people who don’t deserve it. (While I would’ve guessed such a set to represent masculine fantasies almost exclusively, for what it’s worth, most of my fellow theatergoers were female-male couples.) Suspense is generated by threats of apprehension and recognition; the tensest moments are those in which to be recognized is to be apprehended. Dramatic moments are produced by dissimulation and the threat of exposure; the most dramatic moments are those in which to be exposed as dissimulator is to be revealed as betrayer.
In other words, insofar as a review functions to recommend or criticize a film to a potential audience, this review is a wholehearted endorsement to those who can stomach suspense and violence. There isn’t a single disappointing performance, although it’s vaguely worrisome that every character I’ve seen played by Rebecca Hall is constructed around vulnerability and betrayal (cf. Red Riding, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Prestige). Jeremy Renner is outstanding, as is Blake Lively. Chris Cooper, Jon Hamm, and Pete Postlethwaite serve their roles well too.
And then there’s Ben Affleck, the center of the film in every sense: director, co-writer, lead actor. The Town is well-directed, well-written, and well-acted. But Affleck’s deep involvement, coupled with his celebrity and extensive filmography (of course, these latter conditions apply to all the other actors mentioned, in varying degrees), make him too excessive for the confines of the screen. Some people can bracket their awareness of Affleck while watching his portrayal of Doug MacRay, but for me there’s always a moment in which the simulation breaks down, in which a little hole is punctured in the glossy celluloid. The moment in this film arrived when Affleck’s otherwise-convincing Boston accent spilled over into caricature in pronunciation of the word “underoos.” It was one of MacRay’s most emotionally vulnerable and humanizing scenes, and it certainly wasn’t one that was supposed to make me laugh.
There was another scene, at the center of the film temporally and narratively, that struck me as a hole of some sort. MacRay and Claire Keesey, Hall’s character, have sex for the first time, the shots of which alternate with shots of Keesey removing her blindfold at the beach where she was left by her hostage-takers (i.e. MacRay and crew). The meaning of this interspersion still eludes me. Is the film commenting on the commonality in ecstasy between the moment of sexual unity and the moment of life secured against impending death? Or is it a structural element that signifies to the viewer the point of no return, the moment that determines the mutual exclusivity of a revelation of MacRay’s role as villain and a coupling of his and Keesey’s futures? Does it speak to the tragedy of finding home in the person who alienated you from it?
I prefer this last reading. What The Town expresses, through its many gunfights and car chases and other assorted tussles, is that none of us can go home, even when we’re there. The way Lively’s Krista puts it: “Why is it I’m always the one getting used?” Perhaps even better is the anonymous (apocryphal?) quotation from The Globe given at the beginning of the film, “I’m proud to be from Charlestown. It ruined my life, literally, but I’m proud.”
