Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
After “Gigli,” Ben Affleck’s relevance in post-’90s Americana was uncertain. But behind the camera and the editing board, the fervent Red Sox fan has told tales of tender wounds from his hometown Boston like they owned him.
He won an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting,” earned rave reviews for helming the under-loved “Gone Baby Gone,” and his latest work, “The Town” is a front-runner for best picture at the Oscars. Affleck has stepped up to the plate more than ever, like someone unlucky enough to play an unfit position for the longest time.
When it comes down to it, Ben Affleck has only directed two movies and co-written “Good Will Hunting,” but a real director only needs one movie to prove he can direct. Affleck has put himself on the same level as Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola with his imagery alone.
Take “Gone, Baby, Gone,” set in Boston, which recently has become a favorite of great directors to set stories in. It’s as though the Irish carried their poetry along with their huddled masses when they came here. With “Good Will Hunting,” Boston-born Affleck writes a city’s culture that carries a foul-mouthed sense of self, which fosters an unspoken understanding of everyone you meet. From a look across the bar, friends feel each other’s pain and will die to protect one another — the noblest of human qualities in the darkest moments.
If not for anything else, “Good Will Hunting” introduced Affleck’s signature style, focusing on how the city forms the characters’ state of mind. In that film, the main character, Will, suffers from a painful past that imprisons him in a life in which he does not belong. He torments himself like Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull,” but where that film takes the audience inside a man’s mind, Will’s psychology is explored with the relationships he carries with his girlfriend, his best friends and his therapist in “Good Will Hunting.”
Affleck uses personal interactions to explore questions of family and culture in “Gone, Baby Gone.” In his directorial debut, he tells the story of a 4-year-old girl who has gone missing in Boston and the struggle the two detectives investigating the case face. With a large ensemble cast, rich in fractured history and backstory, this film is a pure thriller from beginning. As we rush through, the city is the template, but Affleck handles a much larger issue about justice itself. By the end, you feel the greatest wound this film had to offer: the guilt from a good deed. The film ends happily, but why it ends happily makes you wonder why you feel good in the first place.
This is the most exciting Oscar race in decades. Every week, it seems a new contender for the major categories comes to life on the screen. Talent has literally made this season so cutthroat that even a veteran like Tony Scott, who recently received stellar reviews for “Unstoppable,” stands a slim chance at gaining Oscar nods.
Still, the best may be yet to come, since the Coen Brothers have yet to release their remake of “True Grit,” while “TRON: Legacy” is just waiting to break box office records. But even in light of the competition, maybe “The Town” has the power to gain serious recognition at the awards. If it does, Affleck could be the first director to win the big one and be sexiest man alive. Eat your heart out, Clooney.
