This One’s a Gem
This one is most certainly a gem. Warning spoilers to come. The 2010 gritty drama The Town was directed by Ben Affleck and was his first leading role in six years. Ben Affleck cited The Departed (2006), Heat (1995), Mystic River (2003) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) as influences on this film. Affleck said "All are R-rated movies in that same vein, and the movies I used as the gold standard of success here." In one scene, there is a shot of the TV playing a movie where a white truck rides into a Drive In Movie Lot; this is a scene from Heat. This movie is not as much about the characters and more about the town obviously. The Charlestown neighborhood of Boston is renowned for churning out a high number of armed robbers, generation after generation. These robbers never leave their Charlestown life on their own desire, the neighborhood where there is an unwritten code to protect that lifestyle. Four lifelong friends from the neighborhood, Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), James “Jem” Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), Albert "Gloansy" MacGloan (Slaine), and Desmond "Dez" Elden (Owen Burke) carry out a mostly successful bank robbery, but due to circumstances take the bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), hostage for a short period before releasing her physically unharmed. They find out that Claire lives in Charlestown, so they want to ensure that she did not see anything that could incriminate them. Doug begins to follow her to find out how much she has told the authorities, and to make sure that Jem does not eliminate her as a witness. Soon a romance grows between them, which Doug hides from the gang. She tells Doug that she saw a tattoo on one of the robbers, and he realizes that she can identify Jem and send them all to jail. He knows that Jem will kill her if he discovers the truth, so he persuades her that the authorities cannot protect her, and she decides not to tell the police. As they grow closer, Doug tells Claire of his search for his long-lost mother, whom he believes went to live with his aunt in Tangerine, Florida. He also recounts his chance to be a professional hockey player, which he threw away for a life of crime, following in his father's footsteps. FBI Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) surveils the gang and recognizes their ties to local crime lord Fergus "Fergie" Colm, who has another robbery planned for them. The gang's next robbery in the North End goes awry, and the gang barely escapes. Frawley interrogates the gang, but he fails to get any confessions and is forced to release them. Doug asks Claire if she will go away with him, and she agrees. When Frawley learns that Claire quit her job, he wiretaps her phone, and threatens to prosecute her as an accomplice after realizing that she is seeing Doug. Shocked to discover that he was one of her assailants, she is forced to cooperate with the FBI and breaks up with Doug. Meanwhile, Fergie and Jem are pressuring Doug about the next heist, but Doug is determined to get out. Fergie threatens to kill Claire if Doug does not go through with the job, and reveals to Doug how he controlled his father by making his mother an addict, which led to her suicide. Doug gives in but swears that he will kill Fergie if anything happens to Claire. At Fenway Park, Doug and Jem enter disguised as Boston police officers, steal $3,500,000 in cash. Doug's ex-girlfriend Krista, threatened by Frawley and heartbroken by Doug's going away without her, reveals enough for the FBI to surround Fenway before the gang can get out. The gang is caught in a firefight with FBI SWAT, and Dez and Gloansy are killed. Jem, determined not to go back to prison and out of ammunition, commits suicide by running out of cover with his guns unloaded and is killed by the cops. Knowing that Claire is in danger and that he will never escape as long as Fergie is alive, Doug murders Fergie and his bodyguard and calls Claire. Doug sees that the FBI are with Claire as she tells him to come over, he at first thinks she is betraying him, but eventually she gives him a clue to warn him away. So Doug flees instead, escaping on a train. Later, whilst gardening, Claire finds a bag buried containing the stolen money, a tangerine, and a note from Doug, suggesting that she can make better use of the money than he can, and that they'll hopefully see each other again. Claire donates the money, in memory of Doug's mother, to refurbish the local ice hockey arena where Doug once played. And Doug waits safely in Florida for her.
The original cut was 4 hours long. After realizing that the film would never appeal to wide audiences, Ben Affleck cut the film down to 2 hours, 50 minutes in 3 days. The studio and producers loved it, but they wanted the film to be no longer than 2 hours, 10 minutes. Eventually, Affleck cut the film down to 2 hours, 8 minutes. It makes you wonder what kind of movie this would have been if were the 4 hour long one or even the under 3 hour one. We could’ve been looking at the next The Godfather. Regardless Ben Affleck delivered a fantastic film as director/star. He was very concerned with the actors have authentic-sounding Boston accents. Jeremy Renner surrounded himself with actual convicted bank robbers in Charlestown, for research and to help him nail the accent. When Blake Lively read for the part of Krista, she sounded so authentic that he asked her where she grew up in Boston. She was born in raised in California. Despite her nailing her lines Affleck asked Lively to visit locals in Charlestown. She spent a month hanging around wit locals, their apartments, and bars before filming began. Having grown up in a Cambridge minutes away from Charlestown, he already knew, “We had heard about this neighborhood and we knew they had a code of silence. Over a course of years only about 25% of 49 murders had been solved,” he continued, “The idea of someone being able to kill you with impunity, with a bunch of people watching and they wouldn’t get convicted. So while I knew that, I didn’t feel that I really knew it enough, so I went back when we were making the movie and did a lot of research on the subject.” Affleck interviewed bank robbers in prison as research for the movie. The scene where the cop turns away when he sees the masked armed robbers getting away is based on an actual event Affleck was told about by one of the prisoners.
Chris Cooper's scene was shot on location at MCI-Cedar Junction, a maximum-security prison in Massachusetts. It was the first time anything was filmed there. One of his great lines as Stephen MacRay was, “Look, I gotta die six times before I get out of here; but ill see you again – this side of the other.” Weirdly enough I actually met the real life Stephen MacRay, well that’s not is actual name but the person who the character is based off of. In one heist in Hudson, New Hampshire, two guards were killed, and is alluded to in the film - during a scene where Agent Frawley is briefing his task force, he mentions that Doug's father is serving life for a notorious robbery in Nashua. According to Frawley, the elder MacRay hijacked a "bread truck" (armored car) up to New Hampshire, and when one of the guards saw his face, he executed both of them with their own weapons. Frawley notes that this incident led to the passing of regulations prohibiting the driver from leaving the cab even if his partner is being held at gunpoint. When I was in high school I was in a psychology class and we took a field trip to a local medium security prison. While we were there we were told stories by the prisoners on how they got to jail. It was an unbelievable experience and before we left we were able to ask questions. There was a much older man there who didn’t share his experience but was wearing the same clothes as the prisoners. One of my classmates asked him why he was here and in a very nonchalant way described what he had done saying something along the lines of, “Well I was with a crew and we were robbing this armored car. Some things went wrong and I ended up killing some guards.” While at the time I had no idea that this was actually the man, which Stephen MacRay’s is based off of. But when we were all back in the bus to head home one of our teachers explained to us that she had seen him before in a couple of documentaries for the criminally insane. He was a type one sociopath which is the least bit surprising. Warner Bros. Studio heads initially wanted the ending to be more like Prince of Thieves, which the film is based off of. In the book Doug is mortally wounded during his shootout with Fergie and dies in Claire's arms in her apartment. The ending was filmed, but test audiences approved the theatrical version, in which Doug survives. I think I can speak for everyone when I say I am glad Ben Affleck went his own way with the film truly making it a ‘gem’.
