There’s a cute scene in The Town in which we see an FBI agent sitting in an interrogation room with a Boston criminal he’s just hauled in. The mook is a suspect in a bank robbery where all the perpetrators wore masks, and the agent is trying to get the guy to read a series of phrases off a sheet of paper in hopes of getting a voice identification. But the crook keeps stumbling over his lines — the problem, he insists, isn’t that he has trouble reading; it’s that he’s trying to figure out how to make the dialogue he’s been given sound “more authenticious.”For all its pulp trappings — a bank robber with a heart of gold; a crack team of professional criminals, except for that one loose-cannon member with a dangerous propensity for violence; a big final heist that goes terribly wrong — The Town does have a surprising ring of authenticiousness to it. It’s not quite as much a wallow in white-trash Boston sordidness as Ben Affleck’s previous film as a director, Gone Baby Gone, but it makes good, flavourful use of its Boston locations — working with cinematographer Robert Elswit, Affleck presents the city as a place as mazelike and claustrophobic (and teeming with criminality) as the Casbah. There are no clear vistas here — every location is crammed with fences, walls, pillars. Every street feels crooked and narrow, and even the buildings seem to be leaning towards each other in an effort to block out the sky. Affleck’s character, a onetime NHL prospect who’s found a new calling in the field of armed robbery, keeps talking about how he’s lived his whole life in this city, how he’s never been able to escape from it, which may sound like unconvincing rationalizations, but watching this movie, you kind of go along with the idea that it would be hard to find your way out.
But when Affleck meets Rebecca Hall, he suddenly becomes willing to try. Theirs is a complicated relationship: she is the manager of a bank he and his gang have recently robbed. (They briefly even took her hostage.) Affleck and his partners wore masks the entire time, but knowing that she’s been questioned by the FBI, he contrives to meet her as a civilian, ask her on a date, and feel her out to see if she saw or heard anything that might help the feds identify them. Along the way, of course, he winds up falling in love with her, much to the dismay of trigger-happy best friend, played by The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner, who argues that becoming the boyfriend of the one person who could put you and your partners in prison for 30 years isn’t exactly smart. Or more accurately, “smaht” — everyone in the cast has clearly been working very hard on their Boston accents, especially Renner and, as his slutty sister, Blake Lively. Indeed, these two California-born actors have mastered their accents so successfully that almost everything they say in this movie is utterly unintelligible.
Still, even if you dock The Town a few points for its sentimental ending and its familiar story arc, it’s still a sturdy, solidly executed crime picture. Affleck works well with his cast, and finds lovely little grace notes for almost all of them to play: Pete Postlethwaite as a criminal kingpin, scraping the thorns off a rose as he reminds Affleck who’s boss in his organization; Jeremy Renner, taking a sip from a discarded cup of fast-food Coke, before emerging from behind his cover and charging into a hail of gunfire; himself, suddenly noting how silent it’s gotten after one of his heists and realizing it means cops must be everywhere. He even finds Jon Hamm his first half-decent movie role, as the hardass FBI agent on Affleck’s tail. The role is hardly an acting challenge, but Hamm has very smartly realized that for the movie to work, his character is not the one we should be rooting for — and so he plays him as a guy who’s doing the right thing but behaves dickishly enough while doing so that we’d really rather not see him succeed. For some reason, we want those Irish-American thugs who keep shooting cops in the street to get away with it.
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