“The Town” -Assignment 4 Pt. A;
Sebastian Witt
Visa 1500
Terryl Atkins
Image Attribution: “The Town-Assignment 4 Pt. A; Sebastian Witt.” by Sebastian Witt
I recently saw a film called “The Town,” released in 2010. The plot revolves around Doug, Jem, Des, and Al, Boston bank thieves. Doug holds a female bank manager called Claire as a hostage when one of his robberies goes wrong, befriends her since she doesn’t know who he and his pals are, and eventually falls in love with her. Dough decides he wants out after another hijacking of an armored truck goes fatal for one guard. The FBI is looking into them, and Fergie, the Irish mafia boss, wants them to do one more “Big Job.” Claire still tips Doug despite being forced to work with the FBI and learning that Doug is one of the bank thieves. After betraying Doug’s “baby” mom, Krista, the FBI breaks up the Fenway heist. Doug manages to flee; however, the rest of the bank thieves get murdered by police or Fergie. Doug slays Fergie at the end of the film, and the money he took from the bank turns up in Claire’s Garden.
Characters in the Scene / Movie:
The actors are compelling in their portrayals of people who are leading double lives. They transform into dangerous and terrifying thieves as soon as they put on their masks. To conceal their identities, all of the characters wear a skull mask throughout the robbery. A brief long shot at the start of the heist establishes the characters’ positions, as seen in (screenshot 1). Ben Affleck portrays our protagonist. His persona stands apart from the rest of the thieves through his actions and how the camera films him. His stance is that of a bank robber, with the rifle pointed at Claire; nonetheless, he attends to Claire and calms her down; his voice is calmer than others in action, and he depicts a less menacing demeanor.
(For background information: there are 5-character archetypes in the movie, however, during the bank heist scene I chose, not all the of the characters are present. The bank thieves have on their masks making it hard to follow who is who during the heist.)
Protagonist: Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck)
Nemesis: F.B.I. Special Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), Fergus ‘Fergie’ Colm (Peter Postlethwaite)
Attractor: Claire Keesy (Rebecca Hall)
Mentor: Stephen MacRay (Chris Cooper)
Tricksters: James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), Krista Coughlin (Blake Lively)
The scene I’ve chosen occurs in the first eight minutes of the film where the plot is being established, and we the audience have just learned of the consequence that of the bank robbery and the power of the bank robbers.
This scenario takes place at a Charlestown bank, where crime is considered a way of life. The three major bank robbers stand around the room, each brandishing a pistol, while the bound bank workers are positioned face down on the ground behind the cashiers, frightened for their lives. One of the characters has a gun and is ready to fire at anyone who moves. The characters wear skull masks over their faces to hide their identity and wear black hoodies and pants. The majority of the characters, both men and women, appear to be in their forties. The director employed actors of various races.
The heated incident in the bank is captured using multiple cameras in various positions and views, as demonstrated in the two subsequent screenshots. One camera is positioned at ground level, for example, to get a close-up shot of the bank manager’s horrified face. The interaction between the bank robber and Claire, the bank manager held at gunpoint to open the vault for them to ransack, is depicted by positioning the camera at shoulder level. This strategy intensifies Claire’s emotion and draws the audience’s attention to her actions amid a chaotic scene. The majority of the action in the rest of the heist took place in medium shots and close-ups, shot from various angles to intensify the hostages’ faces and movements.
The setting of the space is gloomy, concentrating on black tones, producing a terrifying, horrible atmosphere. The film is edited with fast-paced frame changes and zooming in on bank robbers with rifles, as well as the terrified faces of bank employees taken hostage. “Specific emotions (such as grief or fear) carry social information that tells a story to the spectator,” according to a 2018 study by Rooney and Bálint (Parkinson, 1999, 2001; Hareli and Hess, 2010). “The camera is also changing angles from vertical to low angles frequently to evoke dread and strength,” according to Sarria (2015). Furthermore, “low angles made characters look taller, stronger, less fearful, braver, and more aggressive than high angles,” according to studies Sarria (2015). The film depicts a significant amount of gun violence, power, manipulation, and deception.
The occurrence of the features and events described above are common in modern action/drama films. To shock viewers, “visual approaches, camera movement to dynamize space, parallel editing to intensify time” (Kendrick, 2019) are crucial factors. Furthermore, a high-speed scenario is created by zooming onto a fearful face (Pierson, 2013) depicted during the bank robbery by switching parallel scenes between the masked robbers’ and the hostages’ faces. Continuous reframes, like most action films, are employed to accentuate a chaotic scenario of bank robbers by “continuing to retain or center a figure or crucial item in frame” (Dimoglou, G. (2021).
“The Town” made $152,566,881 worldwide. The movie was released on Netflix in 2010, and has mostly positive reviews, receiving an impressive 92% from Rotten Tomatoes, 7.5/10 from IMDb. Since Hollywood blockbuster fans are eager to pay for thrills in action movies, violence is abundant in this film. The movie’s consequences show that you may deceive people and use violence freely to get rich quickly. It shows that robbing banks for money is permissible, and that a “bad and manipulative” robber may be a nice guy by murdering Fergie to escape away from the life of crime and avenge his friend’s death.
References:
Dimoglou, G. (2021). Spatial and Temporal Continuity in One-Shot Films: Editing Goes into Hiding (thesis).
IMDb.com. (2010, September 17). The Town. IMDb. Retrieved November 17, 2021, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840361/
Kendrick, J. (2019). A companion to the action film. New Jersey. Kendrick, J. (2009). Film violence: History, ideology, genre. Wallflower. Pierson, M. (2013). The aesthetics of action film-making. Cultural Studies Review, 10(1), 189–192. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v10i1.3553
Rooney B and Bálint KE (2018) Watching More Closely: Shot Scale Affects Film Viewers’ Theory of Mind Tendency but Not Ability. Front. Psychol. 8:2349. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02349 Rotten Tomatoes. The Town. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_town
Sarria, L. C. (2015). The influence of camera angle in film narratives (thesis). Institut for Æstetikog Kommunikation, Cognitive Semiotics Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus.