Of last year’s raft of arty-noir (No Country For Old Men, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, We Own The Night, Michael Clayton, Eastern Promises, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Ben Affleck’s directorial debut is the most traditional, and, cumulatively, an intriguing but only minor success.
Based on Southie laureate Dennis Lehane’s novel, it balances familiar private-eye genre tropes with some original flourishes – the dicks in question are a couple, Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan), neither of whom are exactly immediately persuasive tough guys – and an admirable sense of urban-slum atmosphere and moral questioning. The film however works in fits and starts, alternating startling scenes of percussive realism and remarkable grimness, but also some rather tired elements, like Ed Harris’ aging, grumpily vengeful cop.
The plot woven around him relies on some very thin linkages, and builds to some climactic scenes that are both emotionally and ethically demanding but also, dramatically speaking, hard to swallow. Whilst the film’s visual patterns and thematic interests flirt with the power of fragmentation and chaos, the breakdown of awareness, of no longer knowing what’s going on and why, and what such hazy perception means for the desperate individual human, the narrative nonetheless insists on a false-seeming neatness.
Making sure Patrick loses things he cared about, in making a choice in a moral conundrum that is presented in a set of flimsy oral presentations, isn’t quite the same as courting real moral threat.
It’s still an interesting, detailed directorial debut from Ben, with brother Casey in front of the camera – an arrangement I’ll be happy to see continue. Ben tends to present his Bostonian neighbourhood types too broadly, replete with square-jawed shit-talking Irish thugs, chunky chain-wearing fake gangbangers, and hoody-jacketed, bare-navel welfare skanks. He offers his heavyhitter cast – perhaps a touch too much so, each demanding their indulgent bit of show-acting – meat to munch, but as with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Casey delivers the film with his subtle yet highly expressive performing. In the best scenes, Ben’s camera averts and glimpses with intelligence and felicity, breaking up the smooth flow of its otherwise overly-generic writing and structuring with a real sense of the modern world’s eeriest hells.
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