Once upon a time, an English professor explained to me–and the rest of her class–the seven basic plots in literature. In addition to providing a working context for writers, she suggested, the prevalence of these themes relieves all creative people of the burden of avoiding cliché. If there are only seven stories any of us can tell, then why should any of us worry about drifting into hackneyed territory? There is freedom, she told us, along the well-worn path. Freedom to create our own work without fear of biting or stealing from anyone else. Theft, she argued, would be inevitable. Indeed, it should be embraced.
At some point in her monologue, she wrote on her dry erase board, “Know your influences. Know your competition. Be them if you must. But find a way to play them from inside the mask of yourself.”
Once upon a time, Ben Affleck made a great movie set in Boston. Once upon a time, a great gangster movie was made about Boston. Today, which will surely be hailed as a once-upon-a-time of its own, Ben Affleck has made a great gangster movie set in Boston. The former has been accused of borrowing from both the latters–and from other films like Heat–but that doesn’t devalue its accomplishment. Derivatives–as long as they have nothing to do with Wall Street–are the sincerest form of flattery. And, one could argue, the only thing left to create.
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet–or the film itself–here’s the executive summary of The Town: Ben Affleck plays a dude from Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. He works with three of his friends to rob banks and other high-reward institutional targets. One of his friends, played by Jeremy Renner, is a brother by experience but not by blood. Together, they represent the brains (Affleck) and the heart (Renner) of the crew. During a bank job, they uncharacteristically take a hostage, played by Rebecca Hall, and immediately release her into the Boston wild as soon as the crew has found its way back to the friendly confines of Charlestown.
The conflict in our story occurs in three layers. The first concerns what the crew will do with the woman they briefly held as a hostage. The second concerns whether the FBI will finally unmask the costumed bandits who have thus far eluded capture. And the third, as you could guess, concerns what choices Affleck’s character will make about his own future.
As the conflicts weave together to create the fabric of The Town‘s story, the Affleck and the Renner characters wage a war between two classic villain archetypes: one side chooses a life of crime reluctantly because he is good at it while the other chooses it eagerly because it appears to be the only available choice. The reluctant one mourns his crimes. The eager one celebrates his. While they do compliment each other quite well with their mix of ability and ambition, death will invariably come for one or both because the two sides cannot coexist forever.
The Hall character–despite the more literal presence of a neighborhood dimepiece (played by Blake Lively) who doubles as flame/sister–serves the role of Helen of Troy in this drama. Here, Helen causes the brains and the heart of the bank-robbing crew to swap roles as each wrestles with a simple question: how smart is it to become emotionally entangled with the one reliable witness to your crime? That swapping of roles is what drives the battle between the two villain archetypes. You get a lot more Affleck than you do Renner in The Town, but their interpersonal conflict is ever present in the film.
In addition to that battle, the crew struggles to remain undetected by the FBI. Jon Hamm–more frequently known as Don Draper–plays a character who leads the FBI team pursuing the bank robbers. Ordinarily, Hamm’s team would be the guys wearing the white hats. But they don’t wear white hats. They don’t wear any hats at all. Affleck–in his other role as director of the film–doesn’t permit them to. We get to know very little of Hamm’s character other than that he thinks he is excellent at his job and he seems to enjoy the competitive pursuit of people who commit crimes. It’s a really smart decision by a clever filmmaker–one that suggests more of a style than a simple choice in how to handle one character in one story.
Hamm–or Don Draper if you prefer–can more or less own the frame. You may not have heard of him before Mad Men, but now it is hard to imagine him as anything other than a leading man. How do you relegate an actor like that to the background of your story? You define his character very narrowly and you limit the space he can explore. The result is that we kinda see Hamm’s agent as human, but we’re more likely to see him only as an unrelenting man on a mission. It’s as if director Affleck told Hamm to watch Tommy Lee Jones’ performance in The Fugitive and crib liberally from it.
Affleck made a similar decision with Lively’s character. Many of you may know her from Gossip Girl. I don’t. I still think of her as the hot blonde from Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. And when I do, I think of the chick who kindasorta looks like a star. Given how early she is in her career, you would not be crazy to assume that Lively’s agent or publicist or someone else on her team might advise her to take on opportunities to topline. In The Town, Lively is almost an afterthought. Except for the fact that she isn’t. Like the decision in how to include Hamm’s character, Lively’s character is also pushed to the narrative’s periphery–but much moreso. She’s supposed to be hot. She’s supposed to be hot for Affleck’s character. And she’s not supposed to be able to stand on her own two feet. Lively could probably nail the first two on her own. And she does. The third one–which she may be capable of as well–seems to be borrowed in part from Emily Mortimer’s most nervous moments in Redbelt. Given how it parallels Hamm’s performance, you’re left to conclude that director Affleck had a strong hand in guiding it.
Some of the best directors treat the characters in their films as if they are individual shades of the human spectrum. Some characters represent multiple hues, but it’s perfectly okay for other characters to be limited to a single shade of a single color. There is freedom in that choice to limit. On one hand, the actors are free to play directly to the gut of their narrowly defined characters giving us a magnified view of that specific shade of the human experience. On the other hand, the audience doesn’t have to be distracted by how it feels about one supporting character or another. Instead, the audience can immediately acknowledge the simple purpose of the supporting shades and journey with the multiple-hued main players into some experience which may illuminate life as we all think we know it in a unique or fascinating way.
Think back to some of Stanley Kramer’s films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? or Inherit the Wind. His supporting characters tended to be present in very deliberate ways. As if they were tasked with bringing to life the atmosphere within which the primary characters were challenged to make the big choices around which the film would be built. The characters played by Hamm and Lively in The Town appear to be directed in such a way. Maybe director Affleck is a fan of Kramer’s. Maybe not. But there’s certainly no harm in saying that the work of one emerging filmmaker compares favorably with the work of an old master. At least, there is no harm done to Affleck, the director.
It’s worth noting that The Town is an adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to how faithful the film is to the spirit of the novel. There is certainly a patience in the film that calls to mind the pacing of a good novel. We get dumped directly into the conflict between the two villain archetypes, but the way the romance between the Affleck character and the Hall character unfolds gives us some space to feel sympathy for the human being who reluctantly robs banks for a living. So much so that it is reasonable to root for the guy-who-is-technically-bad-but-kinda-seems-good.
The Town is a film that we’ve all seen before. And we’ll all probably see again. It is a story that has been worn out. And then worn out some more. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is something of an inevitability. And, in director Ben Affleck’s case, it works out pretty well. Very well, I’d say.
DYL MAG SCORE: An 8 that thinks its a 9.
