Book vs. Movie: The Town
By Russ Bickerstaff
September 22, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
The Town
If his biography is to be believed (and, really, why not?) Chuck Hogan was a clerk in a video store in the mid 1990s when his first novel was published. It garnered quite a bit of critical acclaim and sold enough copies to make publishers interested in more of his work. Far from being anything resembling inspired literary genius, Hogan’s debut novel The Standoff was a solidly entertaining thriller involving an FBI agent interrogating a suspect for nine days. In the years that have followed, he’s made a name for himself writing solidly successful commercial stuff - the type of thing that mainstream Hollywood loves. It was only a matter of time before the author (who is currently working on a series of vampire novels with director Guillermo del Toro) finds an adaptation of his work making it to the big screen. A producer took notice of his 2004 crime-romance novel Prince of Thieves—Ben Affleck was approached about the project and the resulting film was released on some 3,500 screens in the U.S. this past weekend. A decade and a half out of working a video store, Hogan’s work makes it to the big screen. A book inspired by Hollywood becomes the subject of a Hollywood crime drama. How do the two compare?
The Book
Set in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, Prince of Thieves tells a gritty, earthbound story about a group of guys who make a great deal of money robbing banks and armored trucks. While there is a fairly large cast of characters, the heart of the story rests on Doug MacRay - a man who once had a promising career ahead of him as a pro hockey player. He’s falling for Claire 0 a woman who works at a bank that Doug and his friends hold-up at the beginning of the story. She was blindfolded for a portion of the caper and Doug was wearing a mask, but does she know more about him than she’s letting-on? And what about the FBI agent who Claire’s been hanging out with since the robbery?
The novel swings back and forth between the working-class crime drama and a somewhat endearingly complicated romantic connection between Claire and Doug. The balance between the two ends of the story are mirrored in an equally balanced thematic aesthetic. One the one hand, this is a very realistic story that delivers more than enough detail to solidly establish a look and feel of the Boston setting. On the other end, we’re dealing with working class people who have chosen a dangerous, illegal pastime that also nets them quite a bit of cash. The narrative rests somewhere between art and grit, tying the two together with a agreeable degree of style and poise.
The novel has pretty good pacing - barreling rather quickly through some approximation of a three act plot structure with an overarching romance tied into it. The three “acts” are each characterized by a burglary job executed by McRay and company. The story starts off with the bank job and ends in a risky burglary at Fenway Park. (Did I mention the book is set in Boston?)
The basics of the story are passably interesting, but the specifics of the plot aren’t terribly original in and of themselves. It’s the details that make Prince of Thieves memorable. Hogan allows Boston a very strong pulse and presence in the novel, but he also pegs the novel pretty squarely in a very, very specific year. In one of the more interesting conversations between the burglars, they’re trying to decide when best to hit a multiplex cinema in early summer of ’96. They’re discussing which film would rake in the most cash - which weekend would be the best to strike. They decide to act somewhere around the opening weekend of Twister. The film alone averaged $17,000 per theatre its opening weekend - quite a draw for a group of guys lying low and making easy money after a bank job. Suffice it to say, things get complicated during the job and there’s something of a shoot-out at the multiplex. Hollywood criminal fantasy mixes with the realities of life in Boston.
In spite of his efforts, Hogan never quite manages to make a larger statement about human nature and the nature of crime. The action thriller/romance works well enough that larger aspirations and deeper meanings don’t feel too terribly missed. The love triangle between the Doug, Claire and the FBI Agent comes close to approximating some kind of deeper theme here. The heart of a victim is torn between a criminal who would give up his life of crime for her and the man who wants to punish him for what he’s done. It’s almost got an interesting depth to it, but the Hollywood, three-act-like rhythm of the plot pries the focus of the novel too far away from deeper themes to achieve anything greater than a solidly entertaining suspense book.
The Movie
The film adaptation of Prince of Thieves makes it to screens with the much less grandiose title of The Town, but in many ways, it’s a far lighter treatment of the subject. Like the book, the film starts off right away with the bank job that finds Doug directly interacting with Claire. As chaotic as director Ben Affleck makes it all look, there’s a clean lack of complexity in the scene. Maybe it’s the editing or maybe it’s the way the shots are composed. Whatever it is, the bank job in the film comes across feeling much less sloppy than it does in the book. It’s an aesthetic that is carried through much of the film.
As the book has a plot structure very sympathetic to a Hollywood-style film, an adaptation of the story would seem to be pretty simple. The screenwriters take liberties with the story that pull it more in the direction of a crime suspense film than a romance. It’s kind of a bold maneuver, as romance mixed with suspense would play really well to the kind of mixed audience that makes for a really good box office draw.
Commercial concerns aside, the film’s treatment of the story keeps Claire (Rebecca Hall) and Doug (Ben Affleck) at a distance, compromising the emotional strength of the story. Any romantic tension of any kind between Claire and the FBI agent is nonexistent here. The film does deliver some kind of palpable connection between Claire and Doug, but it isn’t explored in any great depth.
Weighing as heavily on the crime drama end of the story as it does, the film would also be conspicuously lacking any Boston regional flavor were tit not for the fact that one of the screenwriters taking liberty with the novel’s story was Ben Affleck - a man who spent a fair amount of his childhood in the city. Affleck’s contribution to the story is hard to define, but one hopes that it wasn’t his idea to spend so much time focusing the camera on his own face. While it’s sometimes interesting to see the topography of Affleck’s face gradually migrating in different directions in response to some kind of unspoken emotion, halfway into the film it becomes apparent that the film would’ve benefited from more time between Affleck and Hall.
The dichotomy between the fantastic and the gritty is also suspiciously absent here. The multiplex job is taken out entirely, replaced by the promo-friendly imagery of the guys taking down an armored car wearing old nun masks. With respect to the plot, the scene has the same overall effect as the multiplex heist does in the book, but any attempt to address anything larger than a simple crime drama gets lost in the trip from page to screen.
The final heist - the one that takes place at Fenway Park - makes it to the screen relatively intact, but without a deep enough romance between Doug and Claire, it lacks the dramatic impact of the novel. In the novel, Claire has discovered that Doug is a bank robber and has cast him out of her life. Ditto for the movie, but in the book, he tells her about the Fenway Park job - letting her know all the details. She can turn him in if she wants, but if she doesn’t, they can run away together and he’ll leave the criminal life for good. The Fenway Park job still has a great deal of impact, but the book ends in a drastically different way. Without a deeper romance, Doug’s death would seem kind of pointless, so he simply runs away and leaves all his money with Claire, knowing that he’ll probably never see her again. Doug comes across a lot more sympathetically here. True, Affleck may have been doing this simply in the interest of playing more likeable character, but the ending does fit the adaptation.
The Verdict
The book’s balance between romance and action - realism and fantasy sets it apart from other crime dramas. The film pries away many of these dichotomies from the story. And while it lacks the kind of depth that the book has, even the book’s depth isn’t terribly inspired to begin with. The film isn’t missing anything that was terribly integral to the book. The film tells a solidly entertaining story filmed in and around the Boston area in which the story is set. It’s always nice to see a big budget film that wasn’t shot in Toronto or Southern California. Novels don’t have such limitations, so even the story’s local flavor isn’t quite as much of a novelty as it is in the film. As a result, the film is destined to be remembered far better than the book. The look and feel of Boston make The Town a much more memorable realization of the story.