REVIEW: The Town

The Town (2010): Dir. Ben Affleck. Written by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based off the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper. Rated R (strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use). Running time: 123 minutes

2 stars (out of four)

There is a conversation in The Town where Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck, who also co-writes and directs the film) tells the beautiful bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) everything he knows about police investigations. As the leader of a highly successful team of bank robbers, he knows a good deal. When Claire questions how he became such an expert, he’s quick to respond – he just watches a lot of CSI, he says. That line, which gets a laugh and is one of the film’s few authentic moments, suggests that director Affleck is at least aware of the crime genre’s recent ubiquity in TV and film. Strange, then, that he would willingly throw his film into that exhaustive sea of material without offering anything new. The Town makes an effort to be a lot of different things – a heist film, a redemption story, a straight-up action flick, The Departed – but never develops its ideas enough and ends up a rather underwhelming affair.

The titular town is Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston the opening text informs us is home to more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country. The film opens with one of those robbers, MacRay, about to embark on his latest job. With him is his childhood friend Jem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and two more buddies of theirs who are more or less interchangeable and forgettable throughout the film. The job is a familiar one (for both them and us), involving rubber masks, automatic rifles and a safe. Things go as planned, but to ensure their getaway they take the aforementioned Claire hostage and dump her off blindfolded once they’ve made their getaway.

All this happens before the opening title, leaving the rest of the film to explore the aftermath of the opening heist. MacRay may be becoming interested in Claire, Jem is anxious to score again despite the threat of an FBI investigator (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) on their tail, and a local kingpin (Pete Postlethwaite) tempts the team with a dangerous job. Each of these storylines has dramatic potential, but a script full of stock characters and familiar situations keeps the film from realizing that potential.

Viewed as a heist film, The Town doesn’t involve us enough in the robberies (of which the film gives us three) and Affleck makes little effort to breathe new life into familiar scenes. The crimes themselves are of course not the film’s main focus, but the action scenes fail to raise the dramatic stakes or add anything more than a generic car chase or a shootout.

The Town would like to present itself as a story of redemption, one where our hero MacRay tries to bring himself up from circumstances beyond his control and get out of Charlestown. We never get a sense, however, that his life of crime is one that he’s been forced into. There may be socio-economic conditions forcing young men like him to rob banks but the film neglects to present them. MacRay gets even harder to sympathize with the more he becomes involved with Claire. Rebecca Hall, who was wonderful in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is wasted here playing the attractive woman who’s only allowed to react to the men of the film, never act of her own accord. Claire is lied to and manipulated, and makes some choices late in the film that are hard to believe anyone would make considering all that has happened to her.

Meanwhile, the very reasonable FBI detective Adam Frawley is trying to catch the bad guys. The film perhaps wants to paint him as the antagonist but mistakenly casts the likable Jon Hamm in the role making it unclear where our allegiance is supposed to lie. MacRay isn’t enough of an underdog to root for, Frawley isn’t mean enough to root against, and there is not enough interplay between the two to create some good cat-and-mouse tension.

As MacRay’s best friend, the trigger-happy Jem causes a lot of trouble for no reason. Jeremy Renner does fine with a one-dimensional character but following a much more complex depiction of masculinity in The Hurt Locker, the role doesn’t ask much of him. Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) steps out of her tween-film comfort zone and is strong as MacRay’s drug-addicted former flame. Rounding out the cast is Chris Cooper in a brief appearance as MacRay’s father. Cooper establishes a tenuous father-son relationship in his one, brief scene but his role here is a minor one.

The Town runs off stock characters and familiar themes, never digging deep enough to develop its ideas of family, community or the social trappings of crime. The film passes us by, going through the motions so that we forget it faster than a witness struggling to identify her attacker in a lineup.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/15/10

REVIEW: The Social Network

The Social Network (2010): Dir. David Fincher. Written by Aaron Sorkin based off the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella. Rated PG-13 (sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language). Running time: 121 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) explains to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) how gaining membership into one of the school’s prestigious final clubs will inevitably lead to a better life. The parties are great. You meet rich, influential people. You even have a better chance of one day becoming the President of the United States. When he gets into one, he promises, he’ll bring her along for the ride. After his girlfriend stands up, insulted, and breaks up with him on the spot, Zuckerberg seems surprised. She assures him though that the break-up is not because he’s a nerd, but because he’s an egotistical jerk.

Similarly, the story that follows, which dramatizes the creation of the now multi-billion dollar social networking website Facebook, is not about computers but rather the personalities behind them. Zuckerberg’s problems do not come from writing endless lines of programming, which he could do in his sleep, but from his interactions with other people.

The film begins with Zuckerberg’s first seed of an idea. Following the bitter breakup, he seeks revenge on the girls of Harvard by drunkenly creating Face Mash, a site that allows students to rank pictures of female students. Heavy traffic on the site causes Harvard’s network to crash and Zuckerberg finds himself invoking the ire of both school administrators and the female student body. The site’s initial success, however, draws the attention of fellow computer programmers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) who want to recruit Zuckerberg to help create a social networking site exclusive to Harvard called ConnectU. Almost as soon as he accepts their offer, he begins work on a site of his own with help from his roommate and best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who has the money to finance the project.

Zuckerberg’s partnership with Saverin begins to sour, however, when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of the file-sharing network Napster, enters the picture. Parker, who has accrued millions of dollars through his involvement in several web companies, lives life like a rock star. He knows a thing or two about getting rich quick in the Internet Age and even more about how to spend the subsequent wealth. Seduced by Parker’s life of luxury, Zuckerberg moves out to Silicon Valley and begins to gradually cut Saverin out of the site’s development. We know the end result of Zuckerberg’s actions through scenes of two separate lawsuits against him: the disgruntled ConnectU founders who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea and the betrayed Saverin who feels his friend has robbed him of his fair share of the company.

The scenes of the hearings might have been dull in lesser hands, but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) transforms them into engrossing drama. He manages to make dialogue about computer programming and copyright laws (and there’s a lot of both) easily understood, and keeps his focus on the characters. Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is a thoroughly unlikable individual but Sorkin’s script allows the performance to become a character study. Eisenberg had already proven himself capable of creating likable personas in comedies such as Adventureland and Zombieland, but he broadens his range here. Though he spends much of the film sitting and typing behind a desktop, he develops a subtle and fascinating character.

The rest of the cast is filled out with talented young actors. Andrew Garfield, who was recently tapped to be the new Spider-Man, makes Saverin the most relatable face in the film, and Armie Hammer steals a number of scenes talking to himself as the buff crew team twins who seek financial retribution. Justin Timberlake is well (and perhaps ironically) cast as the young man who effectively ruined the music industry. Some questioned Timberlake’s acting potential a few years back, but he’s wonderful here as the cocky hotshot, giving Parker a layer of vulnerability late in the film.

Holding the film’s many excellent parts together is the emerging style of director David Fincher. Fincher’s underrated Zodiac was one of the decade’s best and though his follow-up, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was less exceptional it still bore the mark of a talented director. As with those films (and earlier works such as Seven and Fight Club), Fincher’s style uses muted colors and claustrophobic angles to bring a dark edge to the material. In Fincher’s hands, Zuckerberg’s success story is filled with images of isolation and detachment. There are also a few stylistic flourishes that you can’t help but just sit back and enjoy. One sequence involving the Winklevoss twins’ close loss at crew match is a virtuosic moment of style that also showcases the exceptional work of editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall.

Fincher and Sorkin craft a story with themes of betrayal and victory worthy of a Greek tragedy, but while the film succeeds in broader terms, it falls just short of making a definitive statement about life in the Internet Age. Fincher presents honest and cynical portrayals of young entrepreneurs who want to get rich quick with the Next Big Idea, but the film never quite confronts the moral implications of what sites like Facebook introduce into the culture. The full disclosure and lack of privacy that are necessarily a part of social networking are occasionally brought up but the film never truly deals with them.

As it is, The Social Network is a fascinating portrait of the world’s youngest billionaire and what he did to get there. There is some debate regarding the film’s accuracy – which is reasonable considering Saverin was a consultant for the source material and no doubt had a biased take on the events – but this comes with the territory of a fictionalized account of real life events. The film is ultimately not about who did what and when, but rather why they did it. The who and what involve computers and a lot of dates and facts, while the why opens up a world of motivations that include sex, friendship, fame and prestige. Factually, this is murky territory to be sure, but it makes for an engrossing human story.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/6/10