by Louis Williams

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: April 06, 2011

The Town

The town is Charlestown, Massachusetts, part of greater Boston, but not the part that houses Harvard, Radcliffe, MIT, and all the other silver spoon institutions. Charlestown is cramped and run down, low rent and hopeless, a place where dreams are strangled in their cradles and life is a long blur of drugs and booze.

It’s also one of the bank robbery capitals of the world, where crime is a matter of generations and families, though not in the Godfather sense. Doug McRay (Ben Affleck), missed out on a mother, who left when he was a child, and a father, who has been imprisoned for life. An orphan, he is taken in by the Coughlin family, misses out on a career as a hockey player, and reaches adulthood the head of a four man bank robbery team, whose employer is Fergus (Pete Postlethwaite), an aging monster who sets the heists up and collects a large percentage of the take. He is what the robbers have instead of Dickens’s Fagin and is every bit as corrupt.

Some people become garage mechanics, others landscapers, others yet plumbers. Affleck and his crew are thieves and, luck being with them, will always be thieves, even into their old age. They’ve been trained for nothing else and, their prospects being nil, don’t miss — at least much — what they can’t even aspire to. The silver spoon universities are completely out of their reach, normal lives nothing they’ve experienced, so when Fergus tells them to go rob something, they go rob it, indeed with flair and inventiveness, once wearing gorilla masks, once dressed as nuns.

It is a life without visible termination, unless they’re caught and jailed. The four men are young, able, scarred, though not to the point of psychosis, by the lives they’ve had, and good for another thirty years. Until, that is, their lives, especially Doug’s, change during a bank robbery, because Doug falls in love with the classy bank manager/hostage, Claire (Rebecca Hall).

He looks at her from inside his monster mask and finds in her everything he’d only dimly realized he’d been missing. Further, she’s entirely different from Doug’s semi-girlfriend, Krista, played with frowsy brilliance by Blake Lively. The trouble is that, crook that he is, he can have Claire only as long as he lies about what he does for a living and for a time he lies his head off. However, lie as he will, he can’t do a thing about The FBI, in the person of a slick,

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