the town

Major spoilers follow.

As a heist movie, The Town is certainly one of the better ones, because it is actually the characters who keep our interest, not just the plot. We are constantly questioning the characters onscreen, wondering what their next move will be, where their loyalties will take them. We sympathize with all of them in turn—with Doug MacRay, the brilliant mind behind a series of Boston bank robberies who begins to yearn for something deeper and more meaningful than his life of crime; with his off-and-on girlfriend Krista, who is a horrible role-model and mother but who does seem to want something better for her young daughter's future; with the unswervingly persistent FBI agent on Doug's trail; even with James, Doug's loose-cannon friend and fellow robber. When Doug unexpectedly finds himself falling for Claire Keesey, the bank manager his gang took as a hostage on their last job, we want their relationship to succeed, to be the path to Doug's redemption. Because director/writer/lead actor Ben Affleck has successfully made Doug into a sympathetic anti-hero in our minds, we are rooting for him to escape and find peace. In the end, though, we feel robbed ourselves—the characters and the viewers both deserve a better ending than what we're given.

Until the end, The Town works as a dark morality tale. It shows us how utterly devastating life in Charlestown (the "bank robbery capital of America") can be, and just how difficult it is to escape that life. When Doug tells his imprisoned father that he is thinking of putting the town behind him, the only explanation his father can think of is that Doug must be "taking heat." "Either you got heat or you don't," he says. There is no other alternative in his mind, no other reason why Doug would want to leave; nothing else computes. This is the mentality of all Doug's acquaintances—life in the town is all there is. How can Doug escape that life when no one else around him acknowledges that anything else even exists, much less offers something better? But Doug genuinely wants to make a change, and we root for him against those impossible odds. Even though he is a criminal with a violent past, even though some of his actions onscreen are despicable, we want him to rise above that. We want to see him redeemed; we want a happy ending.

It makes it so much more disappointing, then, when he is not redeemed. We are supposed to feel happy that he escapes, I guess; happy that Claire does not betray him to the FBI, and even more happy that he does not keep the money for himself, but gives it to Claire so that she can put it to "good" use. But none of this equals redemption. Doug's closing voiceover tells us he believes that everyone must pay for what they've done—but he obviously isn't paying; he's lying low in Florida, suffering no real consequences whatsoever. This "happy" ending falls flat, because it is meaningless and shallow. Doug has not grown as a character, and instead of being the key to his redemption, Claire has fallen to his level.

Technically, The Town is one of the best movies of the year, and I won't be surprised if it gets some Oscar nods. The cast is top-notch; Jeremy Renner, in particular, deserves another acting nomination. Thematically, The Town is a major disappointment. It gives us characters that we really long to see redeemed, and then—instead of redemption—gives us a faux happy ending that probably was intended to make us feel good inside, but just ends up negating anything we learned from the rest of the movie.