The Town

"You and your boys didn't just roll a Stahh Mahhket over in Malden for a box of quart-ahs."

I thought I would cover a recent movie for a change, since most of my posts are about movies that are 30 or more years old. I decided I wanted to write about The Town, and when I did a quick look-up just to recover some facts, I realized that this movie came out in 2010, so it’s actually not that recent. I don’t really need reminders that I’m getting older, but if I did…

I have lived in and around Boston for basically my whole life, but Charlestown is not an area that i have spent a lot of time in, so when I first saw this movie, and read that initial card that says “One blue-collar Boston neighborhood has produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than anywhere in the world,” I was a little surprised. I did Google this to see if it is true, and this is what the bots spit out:

“While the 2010 movie The Town dramatized Charlestown's history, official statistics from the FBI do not support the claim that it has produced the most bank robbers globally or nationwide. However, Charlestown, Massachusetts, has a well-documented history as a breeding ground for thieves and gangsters, particularly in the late 20th century, with its reputation cemented in local lore and fiction”

Well said, Gemini. So, not only is the statement about the bank robbers not true, but I wouldn’t even call Charlestown a blue-collar neighborhood anymore. A quick look at Zillow reveals that the average home in Charlestown is valued at $984,589, up 1.7% over the past year. Basically, if you live in Charlestown, you might as well rob a bank, because they’re sure as heck-fire robbing you.

Fancy Charlestown hang-out. You won’t see me or anyone from the movie here.

Still, like most Boston neighborhoods, there are “townies” who have lived in Charlestown for generations and live in the same houses that their ancestors grew up in. And it is charming in its way, and a rich history is what makes Boston a cool place to live. However, a lot of those old buildings are being torn down and replaced by high-rise condos that are basically put together with LEGOs and yet the rent to live in them for a year is more than I paid to go to college. So yeah, the charm is starting to wane. At least it’s a higher class of criminal living in Charlestown now.

Despite being a lifelong Bostonian-adjacent person, I never developed The Accent. When I was in college, I took a Voice & Articulation class that helped expunge most of it from my system, although somehow “Ah-lington” is still in my vocabulary (instead of “Arlington.”) Still when the casting call went out in 2009 for extras for The Town (long-time readers may remember my post about my experiences as an extra on movies. If not, follow that link if you’re interested. It’s a fun one.), I showed up, in case they needed someone who doesn’t sound like Mayor Quimby in the movie. My friend and I stood in line for awhile, along with scores of Boston residents. This was different for me because this was the only extras casting I went to where I was given a line to read, presumably to test my Boston accent. I knew I didn’t really have one, so I didn't try to fake it, and I figured I had no shot, but I still felt cool. Like I was in the line-up scene in Usual Suspects. I walked in and read the line in my own voice and was done in about ten seconds. My friend took a little longer, pouring over the line, even though he has less of a Boston accent than I do. Since there were plenty of Bostonians there who actually sound like stereotypical Bostonians and not ordinary white guys, we were not called back. At the time, it didn’t bother me, but when I saw the movie, I was a little disappointed. It would have been cool to be in a movie that I actually liked.

The Town was based on a novel by Chuck Hogan called Prince of Thieves, and even though it was not factual, there are definitely elements of truth to it (I once ate at a 99 restaurant in Charlestown that was the site of a famous mob hit). The truth elements expanded after Ben Afflack was hired to direct and star in it. Fresh off directing Gone, Baby, Gone, the studio must have thought, “Who else would we get to direct this?” Well, apparently, Adrian Lyne was originally tapped to direct, but he envisioned a 3-hour, Scorsese-style mob epic, probably with a lot of sex in it, knowing him. The studio decided that people had already seen The Departed, so wanted to try something different. Affleck was looking for a movie that he had some connection to, and did a lot of research on the criminal element in Chucktown (I wonder if he even ate at that 99.) Let’s not forget that Affleck grew up in Cambridge, MA, which is very close to Charlestown geographically, but very far away culturally. So Affleck and his high school buddy, Aaron Stockard, did their homework and the result is a film that feels so real, it even had me believing that Charlestown could be the bank robber capital of the world.

Affleck also stars in the movie as Doug MacRay, one of those notorious thieves of Charlestown, MacRay has lived in The Town his whole life, and was given an interesting back story: he was a former hockey player who was actually drafted to play in the NHL, but he kept getting into fights on the ice, even with his teammates, so he never made it and subsequently got hooked on drugs, since he had nothing better to do after hockey. He kicked the drug habit, and ended up going into the family business of robbing people. His dad, played by Chris Cooper (another Mass native), was serving a life sentence in Walpole Penitentiary for his misdeeds, and although he could get a cushier deal if he played nice with the guards and his fellow inmates, like his son he enjoyed getting in fights. Doug didn’t want to end up like his old man, and was trying for “one last score” so he could get out (It’s a little typical of this kind of movie, but it works here.) Doug is also “searching” for his long lost mother, who he thinks left when he was six years-old, but he later learns that she was just another “toonie” drug addict who had actually overdosed. His Dad basically never bothered to tell him this, because he thought putting up homemade posters with her picture around the neighborhood gave him a raison d’etre.

Doug has a best friend/brother James Coughlin, played by Jeremy Renner, and not only did his performance net him an Oscar nom, he gets top marks from me as an actor who puts on a Boston accent that doesn’t actually sound comical (The guy is from Modesto, and sounds more authentic than all the actual Boston actors do.) Coughlin is the real criminal of the group, and he doesn’t want to leave the life at all. However, he did a stint in prison for killing someone who was planning to kill Doug, so doesn’t want to go back. Coughlin also has a sister, Krista (Blake Lively), who has a daughter that everyone assumes is Doug’s, although Doug denies it. She clearly loves him, though, but is basically drunk or high all the time, so Doug kind of keeps her at arm’s length (Well, sort of. They do sleep together.)

The real drama comes when Coughlin takes bank employee Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage on one of their heists to help ensure their escape. After making their getaway, they let her go, by telling her to walk towards Boston Harbor blindfolded until she feels the water on her feet, a’ la Friends of Eddie Coyle. They take her license so they can say “We Know where you live if you talk to the police,” and when they look at it later they discover that she lives in Charlestown, too. Doug takes charge and offers to tail her to see if he can find out what she told the police, and of course he falls for her.

Speaking of the cops, Jon Hamm, in prime Don Draper mode, plays Special Agent Adam Frawley, and in no way does the movie attempt to portray him as anything but the bad guy. When an armored car driver is shot by Doug’s crew, Hamm wants to asphyxiate him just so he can send Doug and his friends away for murder instead of just robbery. He intimidates Claire in an attempt to get her to rat out Doug, and then taps her phone to get intel, when she is actually the victim in his investigation. He also tells Claire that Doug was one of the bank robbers that took her hostage, so that puts the kibosh on that relationship. But maybe the worst thing he does is use Krista and her lovelorn, drug-induced sadness to trap Doug on his next big job by telling her about him and Claire. It’s very middle school in a way, and is a total scumbag thing to do, but it works.

The next big job happens to be robbing Fenway Park, what Pete Postlethwaite’s Florist/mob boss who hires/intimidates the boys into robbing it accurately describes as “the cathedral of Boston.” In one of the most tense robbery scenes that you will see in any heist movie, Doug, Coughlin and their gang break into Fenway the morning after a four-game series with the Yankees, and almost walk out with $3 million. Except, thanks to Krista, Frawley and the Feds are outside. After their friends are taken, MacRay and Coughlin walk out dressed as cops. Only problem with that is Coughlin walks out carrying a huge bag of money, and is easily recognized. Since Coughlin prefers death to prison, and he’s a total psycho, he goes out guns a’blazing, or what Wikipedia describes as “suicide by cop.” MacRay watches him die, but decides to escape in the chaos.

Doug shoots The Florist to cover his tracks, then goes home and gathers up his savings. He calls Claire to see if she is willing to run away with him. He watches her from a hiding spot outside as they talk, and he sees Frawley in her apartment with her. She uses a story she had told him about her dead brother to say he should come by *wink-wink, say no more*, so he realizes that she didn’t sell him out and they are all good again, and he gets on a train out of town. Figuring it out a little too late, Frawley gives her one final parting shot, reminding her that the FBI are a “national organization,” and they will probably catch him sometime.

In the final scene, we see Claire digging in her community garden, where she finds a bag of money, and a tangerine, as Doug had told her earlier that he always thought his Mom had gone to live with his aunt in Tangerine, Florida. Also in the bag was a note, stating that he was sorry for everything, and that she would probably do more good with the money than him. We see that she uses the money to renovate the youth hockey center, naming it after Doug’s mother. We see him in a small house, looking out over the water, presumably in Tangerine, having actually gotten out of Charlestown. You half-expect the Shawshank ending to happen, but Claire probably will never bother taking that trip to Tangerine, seeing as how Doug was kind of a liar.

There was another ending, though, apparently the one that Affleck wanted. In this alternate ending, as he is making his way to the train station, Doug is stopped by Charlestown street thugs, ones that he and Coughlin had beaten up earlier in the movie for accosting Claire, and apparently had been hired by The Florist in case anything happened to him. Doug tries to buy them off with what little money he has left, but they shoot him dead, with one of the last things he sees being a plane departing Logan Airport, rubbing it in his face that he never got out. It’s a nice twist that calls back to the thugs from earlier in the movie, but also kind of random. I know that Doug probably didn’t deserve a life of quiet dignity after everything bad he had done, and it was a sort of “live by the sword, die by the sword” kind of thing, but still, those guys didn’t really earn the right to kill him. In this instance, the Hollywood ending was somehow the less cliche’ of the two.

Having said all that, even though it is not real, it is the realism that I spoke of earlier that makes this movie resonate. I can’t speak for anyone who doesn’t live around here (maybe they don’t give a crap about any of it), but something about the actual locations helps it hit home. There are Boston movies where the characters live on the North Shore, and then take a trip to Quincy for a two minute conversation just because it's cinematic and looks nice, but in real life, nobody would bother driving all that way just to have a meeting at a quarry. But in The Town, you could definitely see Doug and Claire going from Charlestown to Harvard Square to have lunch, because they’re very close, and that’s where Claire’s bank was. The only real problem I had with the locations part was the car chase through the North End at rush hour and almost no one on the streets. That was just a Tobin Bridge too far.

The characters also make the movie for me. You could say that Doug MacRay is the “Hooker with a Heart of Gold” that you see in a lot of these movies, but the script does a good job with making you see how he got to that point and why he wants to get out of Charlestown so bad, from his imprisoned father to his damaged love interest and psycho killer friend. It’s a lot, but it does help you root for the guy, which is another reason why the alternate ending would have been so much more of a downer. The Town is really a parable for a lot of people like Doug MacRay. Not bank robbers necessarily, but people who have lived in the same places as their parents and grandparents and just never get a chance to see the world. It sometimes takes a lot of money, which you may have to steal, but you can get out if you really want to.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Please like, subscribe, comment and share if you are so inclined. And if you want to go the extra mile, you can buy me a coffee, buy a t-shirt, or buy my comic. Also, like most white males, I have a podcast, so you can listen to that here.

Now get in your cahh and get outta he-ah, kid.