In Contention

Tag: Gone Baby Gone

  • The Oscar-winning Boston Movie

  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Town’ screenwriter, director and star Ben Affleck

    Actor — and as of late, filmmaker — Ben Affleck makes his way to a cozy corner of Santa Monica’s Casa Del Mar hotel restaurant. He’s coming from a “Dad’s event” at his daughter’s school, he says, propping his feet up on a nearby chair.

    Currently shooting Terrence Malick’s latest film in Oklahoma, the multi-hyphenate has a window for awards season publicity and Warner Bros. seized the opportunity. Affleck’s second directorial effort, “The Town,” has kicked up enough buzz to legitimize an all-out Oscar push, and judging by most reactions to the film, it could be an effort well-rewarded.

    I pass along one such reaction — from actor Robert Duvall, who greatly enjoyed the film — and Affleck’s eyes light up. “Wow, really? That’s great to hear.” He playfully riffs on Duvall’s characteristic voice, adding, “He’s a spectacular personality. A genius.”

    That mixture of humility and humor highlights the majority of our conversation. Affleck is as affable as they come. Perhaps it’s years of navigating the game and knowing how to put his best foot forward with a journalist, but it rings through with authenticity. He’s a guy’s guy with a thoughtful charisma that has served him well over the years, but now he finds himself putting it all to use in the director’s chair. And while he is very appreciative of the success his latest film has achieved, he notes that he came to it apprehensively.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Town” (***)

    Venice Film Festival

    Many actors-turned-directors use their outings behind the camera to express something of themselves that they feel hasn’t been enabled by the filmmakers they’ve worked with thus far: personal passions or preoccupations, social or political responsibilities, alternative thespian workout plans or simply a craven desire for awards they haven’t been able to win on their day job.

    Ben Affleck, however, is not drawn by any of these urges. Ben Affleck just wants to make movies. And with his sophomore feature “The Town” – a crisp, grown-up, tangily written thriller one might call “conventional” if studio entertainments this efficient weren’t so hard to come by these days – he further proves that he can make very good ones indeed.

    Affleck’s directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone,” a solid Dennis Lehane adaptation with a fluffed denouement, arguably received a mite more praise than it warranted due to general surprise at the sheer professionalism on display. “The Town” is a more followed-through genre effort with fewer artsy flourishes, but is perhaps destined to be underrated instead by critics expecting Affleck to develop more of an auteur’s ambition.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane

    Shutter Island by Dennis LehaneDeep into Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel noir “Shutter Island,” there’s a wonderfully telling exchange between the two central characters. Reflecting on the gothic heights to which their situation has spiralled, one observes, “It’s all a bit Grand Guignol, don’t you think?” His partner’s reply: “I don’t know what the fuck that means.”

    Ostensibly a nod to class difference within the narrative, it’s also arguably a tongue-in-cheek dig at the novel’s self-reflexive straddling of high and low culture. “Shutter Island,” of course, is Grand Guignol of the highest order, but with an acute awareness of the term: steeped in references to throwaway pulp fiction and lurid 1950s B-movies, but written with the literary discipline and deference of a serious novelist.

    Needless to say, Boston-ish setting aside (and even then, “Shutter Island” goes to significant dramatic lengths to distance itself from the city), the novel is a very different beast from the two Lehane titles successfully given the screen treatment in recent years. For all their whodunnit trappings, “Gone Baby Gone” and “Mystic River” traded largely in earnest authenticity; “Shutter Island,” by contrast, hinges on artifice.

    Lehane has apparently stated his admiration for Graham Greene’s alternation between “novels” and “entertainments”: this, carefully wrought and quotation mark-enclosed as it is, is plainly his idea of a pure entertainment, a funhouse, a ride.

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  • Is Dennis Lehane the new Jane Austen?

    Okay, perhaps not. Maybe more like the new Elmore Leonard. But the quintessential Boston writer is clearly Hollywood’s favourite author du jour. After the adaptations of “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” reignited the careers of Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively, it seems the studios are snapping up his titles faster than he can write them.

    I hardly need to remind you about a little film coming up next year called “Shutter Island,” based on Lehane’s 1950’s-set suspenser. With Scorsese hoping for lightning to strike twice for him in Beantown, and Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow and Michelle Williams just some of the names on board, who isn’t excited about that?

    With less fanfare, but interesting nonetheless, we also have an upcoming adaptation of Lehane’s brilliant short story “Until Gwen,” with Josh Olson, the Oscar-nominated writer of “A History of Violence,” taking both scripting and directing duties on the project.

    Now Variety reports that the latest filmmaker to take on Lehane is Sam Raimi. Columbia has got in early and nabbed the author’s yet-to-be-published “The Given Day” for Raimi to direct.

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