In "The Departed," Martin Scorsese presented Boston as a brutal yet colorful playground for crooks and cops and crooked cops. This was the old master at his most garish and fun -- challenging his actors (most notably Jack Nicholson) to revel in ostentatious, almost cartoonish performances.
"The Town," also based in Boston, is a pedal-to-the-metal heist thriller, but for all its gun battles and car chases it feels like the more grounded of the two movies. Maybe because its director -- Ben Affleck -- seems more interested in the pathos of violent men than the spectacle of their violence.
Affleck finds the core of their desolation in the festering neighborhoods they have never left. After making his directorial debut with the grimly atmospheric "Gone Baby Gone" in 2007, he again displays a gift for conjuring the authentic mood and aura of a specific place. Clearly, Boston's underbelly is his No. 1 muse.
Charlestown is one of the city's oldest Irish neighborhoods, and if we are to believe the movie's premise, this square mile of rowhouses and tenements is the spawning ground for many of Boston's most notorious bank robbers, their vocation passed down from father to son.
Affleck directs himself as Doug MacRay, the leader of a blue-collar heist squad. With full Bah-ston accent, Affleck plays MacRay as the compassionate criminal. In the film's stunning opener, the crew takes down a Cambridge bank brandishing assault rifles and wearing Halloween masks. To ensure their escape, they take the bank's manager, a young woman named Claire, hostage. They let her go, but soon MacRay tracks Claire down, taking pity on her for the distress he's caused. Charmed by his kindness, she falls for him, having no idea who he really is.
Like every Hollywood bank robber before him, MacRay needs one last score before he can call it quits. Foiling his plan is an FBI agent played by Jon Hamm ("Mad Men"). Hamm sheds his pampered TV image for a scruffy lawman obsessed with stopping MacRay.
While the film is based on Chuck Hogan's novel "Prince of Thieves," Affleck's vision owes just as much to Michael Mann's 1995 heist opus, "Heat." Like that film, "The Town" finds its best moments in the quiet, intense conversations between men on both sides of the law, while the elaborate heist sequences simply act as exclamation points.
As an action movie, "The Town" is good. But as a moody character study, it can be mesmerizing. In Affleck's great assembly of actors, two stand out. Jeremy Renner ("The Hurt Locker") chews through every one of his scenes as MacRay's hot-tempered partner in crime. Pete Postlethwaite melts into the role of an Irish crime boss with a peculiar day job. The 65-year-old actor is skin-and-bones here -- his large head bobbling on skinny shoulders -- but as Fergie the Florist he is chilling, snipping away at the stems of roses as if they were the limbs of his enemies.
