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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.

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