‘The Town’ – Affleck nails Boston, accents

(Guest post by Chase Squires)

I’ve long argued that of the languages and accents I know, the Boston accent is the hardest to mimic.

Anyone who hasn’t lived in eastern Massachusetts (pronounced “EE-stehn MAH-ss”) and can’t ask for a tonic or a frappe without a hint of irony, make a packy run, eat a Hoodsie with a wooden spoon and navigate a rotary isn’t going to be able to fake it on the big screen. Good actors can pull off a Southern accent, surfer accent, even an English accent (witness how all the Germans talk in old-school Nazi movies … they all have English accents). To wing a Christer of a Boston accent? You have to live there.

Ben Affleck gets it.

Meet him at Drunkin’ Dognuts for a mug-up or at Kelly’s for a quart of clams. He gets the accent. He knows when to drop the “R” (usually from a place it belongs) and when to add one (most often in a place it doesn’t). He gets credit for not saying “wicked,” not even once, because that would be too obvious. And he and his crew can cuss with the best (only it’s not called cussing, it’s called swearing … and it’s pronounced “SWAH-rihn”).

“The Town,” Affleck’s latest film, is the story of hardscrabble neighborhood guys who take up bank robbing from their home in Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood known in the day for ties to the Irish mob. And for being a place you didn’t want to live.

Disclosure: I didn’t grow up in Boston, I grew up on the wealthier North Shore. But I remember Charlestown from family trips to the city. The tottering Triple Decker apartment buildings stacked in the shadow of the ugly green supports of the Mystic River Bridge, and the narrow streets filled with trash on the field trips to the old Boston shipyard to see “Old Ironsides” or to climb the Bunker Hill Monument. It wasn’t a pretty place.

Apparently it’s changed, judging from a Google street-view tour. It’s gentrified. Not the place I remember. But for “The Town,” Affleck clings to images of the old neighborhood to give his film some street cred. This one would’ve played better as a 1970s period piece.

So he gets a thumbs-up for nailing the accent and for lining up actors who can pull it off. The voice is authentic. His car chases on the neighborhood’s narrow, steep streets are gripping. The stupid plastic lobster hanging from a barroom mirror in the background is dead on.

Then, he overplays the sense of place. Nobody wears that much Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and “Kiss me I’m Irish” garb. No one. The gangster from the old country with the Irish brogue? Those guys have been dead for 20 years. And when it comes out on DVD, the kids at Boston University will make a drinking game out of the way he paints the town in shamrocks. See a shamrock in the background? Drink! Did a Hallmark Card store explode at St. Patrick’s Day? Shots of “the projects” next to the Bunker Hill Monument park (uh, no), kids with Sox caps at every turn, even a background of Bunker Hill Community College?

We get it, you’re in Charlestown.

And when he puts one of his gangsters in a touristy blue “Boston” hoodie straight from the Fanueil Hall gift shops, that goes too fah. Way too fah.

(Photo: Jeremy Renner nails the local accent in “The Town,” a bank heist thriller set in a tough Boston neighborhood.)

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