Movies
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From the Director of Argo, Ben Affleck's movies
Gone Baby Gone -
With their tribal loyalties and unkillable grudges, the cops, hoods, and hard-eyed women of South Boston have become the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy at the movies in recent years. The neighbourhood is a hotbed of broad-vowelled agonistes in Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’, Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’ and now ‘Gone Baby Gone’, the flawed but impressive directorial debut by Boston native Ben Affleck.
Like ‘Mystic River’, Affleck’s film is adapted from a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it’s steeped in local colour and texture, and it hinges on a lost child, an anguished parent, and a grievous backstory that sort of explains all. (Due to superficial resemblances to the Madeleine McCann kidnapping case, ‘Gone Baby Gone’ was withdrawn from the London Film Festival in 2007 and pushed back from its original December release date.)
When little Amanda McCready goes missing, hopes are dim. She’s from a neighbourhood where residents aren’t disposed to talk to the cops, and her junkie mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), has incurred the wrath of a drug kingpin. Those are reasons enough for Amanda’s devoted aunt and uncle (Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan) to hire a young boyfriend-girlfriend team of private investigators, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck, Ben’s brother) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan in an inert, thankless role), who then spend the requisite amount of time earning the trust of the cynical, squinty detective on the case (Ed Harris, naturally) and the heartbroken police captain (Morgan Freeman), who knows parental sorrow all too well.
The Oscar-nominated Ryan is fantastic, creating a character who’s at once fearsome and pathetic. Casey Affleck’s wry, soft-spoken poise is the movie’s backbone, and as Kenzie’s investigation twists and deepens, the character enters uncharted and hopelessly blurred moral territory, where sacred bloodlines seem to lose their resolution and doing the right thing starts to look all wrong (and vice versa). The rub, though, is that the film’s compelling ambiguities come to a head in a final, puzzle-solving final-reel development that is so mawkishly convoluted and screamingly absurd that it threatens to upend all the fine work that went before it.
Town -
If Gone Baby Gone wasn't proof enough that Ben Affleck could be a real filmmaker, here comes The Town to further establish his credentials -- and to reestablish him as a strong, vulnerable leading man.
Gripping and moving at the same time, The Town is a solid heist movie whose fleshed-out characters give the story the weight it requires to be more than just a caper film.
Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan (and adapted by Affleck, Aaron Stockard and Peter Craig), The Town is about a crew of armored-car and bank robbers, led by Doug MacRay (Affleck), who all hail from the Charlestown neighborhood in Boston -- supposedly the area of the U.S. that produces the most bank robbers per capita.
But something happens on the job that opens the film: Doug falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the bank manager, who they take hostage -- briefly -- because someone triggered the silent alarm. They release her unharmed, but Doug's excitable partner Jem (Jeremy Renner), is afraid she'll somehow implicate them to the FBI. He wants to eliminate her but Doug has other ideas.
Though supposedly assessing her as a threat, Doug instead finds himself drawn to her. So post-robbery and sans disguise, he maneuvers himself into a position to ask her out.
The untenable relationship blossoms, even as she is also mildly pursued by the FBI agent, Frawley (Jon Hamm), who is chasing MacRay and his crew. But MacRay is dealing with other baggage as well. He's a recovering alcoholic who sees in Claire the exit door from a lifestyle that no longer makes sense to him.
Getting out isn't that easy. He's lifelong friends with Jem and a former lover of Jem's skanky sister (Blake Lively). So any attempt to put them behind him is seen as a personal betrayal. He also has a father (Chris Cooper), another bank robber, who he visits in prison -- and who reminds him of the dangers of thinking above his station.
MacRay is in an untenable position. The FBI is getting closer, even as his relationship with Claire is heating up. Their future is less than uncertain; it's impossible. Yet he sees her as a source of his own salvation, though he knows he can't keep the truth from her forever.
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