Blue Collar Professionalism: A Review of ‘The Town’

Armoured car robberies. Divided loyalties. Love across social boundaries. A single-minded FBI agent. These are not elements which sound fresh, even if they do instantly push reliable buttons of escapist entertainment. If Michael Mann did not put a lid on the genre with Heat, then surely David Mamet did with Heist? The former expanded everything to an epic framework of isolationist emptiness, the latter honed in on the mechanics of the con and found them to be hollow too. But the heist film lives on, and is now tackled by Ben Affleck in his follow-up to his debut Gone Baby Gone. The Town is a disappointment, but it’s an immersive one.

Affleck casts himself in the lead role, a Charlestown, Boston native and professional bank robber. Not that professionalism is the focus of the film: the details in the robbery sequences (microwaving security tapes, bleaching away prints and fibres) are engrossing, but there are no meticulous scenes of planning and organisation. This is a day-job for Affleck’s Doug MacRay and his gang: they’re normal people, not single-minded automatons. This allows the film to ground itself in the everyday existence of the characters, their barbecues and casual social connections. Like the Boston neighbourhood of Gone, Baby, Gone, Charlestown is here a grim and hopeless place which nevertheless the residents take deep pride in (“like it was something they’d accomplished”).

This focus on a locality, as well as the criminal milieu and downbeat plotting, call to mind Antoine Fuqua’s recent Brooklyn’s Finest, and The Town suffers from many of the same problems. Fuqua is better at sloshing in the dark dramatic pulse of the seediness he depicts; Affleck’s skill is the perhaps more mature even-handed depiction of protagonists that would be turned into caricatures by a director with less understanding of his setting (Affleck grew up in a nearby neighbourhood). Such an approach harkens back to similar American thrillers of the 1970s, films like Cruising and The French Connection, in which criminal activity was endemic of social disenfranchisement.

For my money Affleck’s debut was better at revealing the tension between glossy narrative simplification (bound up with media saturation) on the one hand, and personal moral imperatives on the other. When, in The Town, a character who is being forced to betray a friend asserts “I’m a person”, it’s the cry of a character in a genre piece trying to be more than the mechanics of her role in the drama. This is a fascinating approach to the issue of realism and drama, and it bubbles away beneath the surface throughout (once again Affleck uses the CSI series as an abutment to his own methodology).

As a technical exercise, it is in the film’s final third that it most impresses. A robbery at a Boston landmark devolves into a gun battle which can stand amongst cinema’s best, even though there is the lingering suspicion that the pyrotechnics are undermining good work elsewhere. When Neil McCauley moves to kill a member of his gang who betrayed him in Heat it is an expression of his newfound personal freedom; when The Town begins moving in the same circles, it feels like lazy playing to the gallery.

As a consolidation piece (of Affleck's directorial skill, of Jeremy Renner's credentials as an angry young sociopath, of Boston's de facto positioning as recession era every-America) there is much to admire. Indeed, while it feels unremarkable for much of its running time, it has been two days since I visited The Town and I'm itching to go back, fearing I missed of neglected some of its subtler topography. This alone makes it the best splashy American crime offering for some time.