'The Town' Review: Brilliant, Powerfully Real

Joining the family business – whether following in a parent’s footsteps as a doctor, lawyer, plumber or tow-truck driver – is a frequent American tradition. But for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, the family business is robbing banks.

The FBI has singled out Charlestown and its one-square-mile radius as the area of America that has produced more bank robbers than any other place in the nation. And in his new movie “The Town,” Ben Affleck plays Doug MacRay, who leads a gang of thieves even as his conscience gnaws at him and makes him want to walk away from the thug life. Yet, it’s the only life he knows, since his father (played by Chris Cooper in a harrowing one-scene cameo) is rotting in prison on five life sentences for crossing the line by killing a guard on one of his own robberies.

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Seeing his father waste away and watching his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) walk ever closer to the edge of killing innocent victims himself, Affleck is working up the nerve to get out once and for all when Jem takes a young bank executive named Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage amid the film’s opening heist. The gang later learns she lives smack in the middle of their neighborhood and fear that she might recognize them, so Doug volunteers to test a meeting with her and see if their masks were effective.

Seeing her shaken by the traumatic aftereffects of the robbery, and realizing she doesn’t know he was involved, Doug starts to hang out with her out of genuine interest and soon falls for her. Dreaming of finally having someone to run away with, Doug is ready to make his stand – until twist after twist after twist start to unfold and unravel his best intentions.

Coming within a month of the wildly entertaining “Takers” and the brutally realistic French double-feature gangster epic “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One,” it’s easy to think that “The Town” is just another product of the Hollywood assembly line. Yet as good as the other three heist films are, “The Town” has far greater ambitions and, with Affleck at the helm as director and co-writer, it achieves every one of them.

The key to “The Town”‘s superiority lies in its heart. Where “Takers” occasionally has a glimpse of the deeper emotions roiling beneath the surface of its thieves, most of the film consists slickly executed plotting and a vibrant surface sheen. “Mesrine” is basically a French “Scarface,” piling on one extravagantly brutal and jaw-dropping crime sequence after another while barely taking a breath.

Affleck, meanwhile, has imbued “The Town” with a palpable sense of sadness. Everyone involved wants to better their lives, but just don’t know how to do it right. But, even as Doug MacRay finds himself having to act utterly ruthless at times, the dark family secrets that drive him – that may sound like a cliché, but Affleck and his co-writers Aaron Stockard and Peter Craig make them brilliantly, powerfully real – come spilling out to his newfound soulmate, making viewers root for him to find a way out at all costs.

Every aspect of “The Town” is thoroughly thought out, starting with the intricate comparisons of how the robbers plan their attacks and how the FBI agents (led by Jon Hamm) seek to counteract them. Add in searing performances from a stellar cast, gritty cinematography by Oscar-winner Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”) and an eclectic score by Harry Gregson-Williams and David Buckley that combines traditional Irish melodies with pulse-pounding rock, and the result is a film that shakes viewers to the core.

From a moral perspective, “The Town” is often messy to consider. Doug may be nicer than the other guys in his gang, but they’re still robbing banks and threatening people’s lives in the course of doing so. His relationship with Claire is rooted in a lie, though he does strive to make good on that later. The language is definitely R-rated, though the foul stuff mostly occurs amid robbery action, while the film’s many thoughtful moments are rendered tastefully, and the one sex scene is show in deep shadow with only Affleck exposed and from the waist up.

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT:

Yet as the final job, a daring robbery of Fenway Park after a gold-mine weekend of Red Sox-Yankee games, spins out of control, MacRay is also popping the trigger on automatic weapons aimed at the Boston police. The film unequivocally wants the audience to root for him, which demands cheering on wrongdoing, although he ultimately gives up most of the money in a way that touchingly helps others and helps himself finally achieve closure on his tortured past.

This is Affleck’s second writer-directorial effort (the other was the also-terrific “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007) since he realized that he had to find a way out of the crushing pressures of his early fame. He knew he had to retrench to his Oscar-winning (for “Good Will Hunting”) skills as a writer to reclaim respect after a string of critical and box-office duds. It is that drive that clearly connects him to the passionate heart of Doug MacRay, and here’s hoping he keeps finding more dream projects to pursue.