Almost Criminal

THE TOWN

Directed by Ben Affleck

Runtime: 123 min.

MARTIN SCORSESE’S PILOT episode for the TV series Boardwalk Empire finally gives HBO what the cable network has been faking for years: a sense of cinema. Scorsese gives it filmic qualities that have been degraded by most television production practices; qualities that are almost infinitesimal but real—as in the je ne sais quoi of a weirdly sumptuous New Year’s Eve celebration where cascading black balloons convey an impending social disaster as a culture celebrates its self-destruction.

That’s how Scorsese depicts the onset of Prohibition in this series about bootlegging in 1920 Atlantic City. Through camera pacing, lurch-pause montages and subtly expressive acting, Scorsese finesses the social corruption he’s previously practiced in too many theatrical films but that almost every HBO series from The Sopranos to Deadwood to True Blood has tried imitating—unfortunately with TV directors who trivialize Scorsesean violence and make ethnic vulgarity blatant.

That TV-style blatancy now infects real movies, as can be seen in The Town, the second film directed by Ben Affleck in a crude, HBO style that should not pass for cinema. Affleck sets up the tale of Boston Irish bankrobbers in imitation of Scorsese’s The Departed, but without the aesthetic finesse to even give an impression of depth. The Town is nearly as ludicrous as his debut Gone Baby Gone—another poison pen letter to Beantown.

The Boardwalk Empire pilot has flashes of emotional authenticity such as Steve Buscemi’s duplicitous pol and Michael Pitt’s ambitious racketeer. Pitt’s a low-rent DiCaprio who easily sleazes a post-WWI decadence, a version of the self-loathing Scorsese’s theatrical films have over-mythologized. But is there a real character anywhere in The Town? Is it Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck), the potential hockey star from Boston’s Irish ghetto who reverts to neighborhoodtype and becomes a bankrobbing thug?

Or Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), the willowy middle-class girl abducted during Doug’s robbery who falls in love with him? Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) the ruthless, unshaven Marlboro Man FBI agent who plays the lovers against each other? Jem (Jeremy Renner), the psychotic homeboy desperate to keep Doug at his own miscreant level?

Answer: None of these stereotypes, handed down from The Departed by way of Mystic River, are real characters. That’s because The Town, directed and co-written by Affleck, uses that same exploitative, pseudo-naturalistic expression HBO now takes for verisimilitude. Using his actor’s

sentimentality, Affleck pretends to tell the truth about the rough working-class world: Boston’s Charlestown section living by its “pitiful Irish Omerta,” same as Boardwalk Empire. But by reducing cultural specifics to criminal statistics, Affleck commits the ultimate middle-class condescension. His tightly grasped clichés (there’s even time-lapse clouds to show inexorable fate) means he’s merely enjoying the low-life heist film conventions, glossing over how poverty corrupts.

The familiarity of these clichés explains the critical raves for Affleck’s two directorial stints. Given their specious ethnic subject matter, it is necessary to point out the mainstream media’s preference for this heist fantasy over the superior Takers as proof of racial preference; critics swallow Affleck’s thuggish pieties while ignoring the ethnic details in Takers and dismissing director John Luessenhop’s splendid distillation of genre form that gave it speed and complexity. But in The Town, plot and characterization are slowed down to idiotbox pace and banality. It’s not even as good as Boardwalk Empire, which improves on Gangs of New York but still isn’t as good as Scorsese’s old classic.

The Town isn’t really about ethnography as Scorsese’s Mean Streets personally incorporated into film noir; it merely romanticizes underclass degradation. The Town vulgarizes the Beantown mythology of Good Will Hunting. When Doug displays legal expertise to Claire, his explanation—“I watch a lot of TV, CSI, all the CSIs, and Bones”—reveals the film’s actual source. Affleck speaks a Boston accent using a clenched, Adam Sandler voice that only draws attention to his love-struck palooka shtick. Doug’s attracted to Claire’s class, yet the idea is so contrived it’s never suggested that she could be attracted to his. Instead, the film’s real interest lies in the loud, violent crime scenes—faking social observation but essentially appealing to the criminal element. The Town is so phony it makes Scorsese seem sincere.