Presumably Ben Affleck‘s The Town (i.e., the weekend’s top film) has now been seen by a fair percentage of HE regulars. Did anyone find Rebecca Hall‘s character — a fetching, upstanding, kind-hearted bank officer — remotely believable? Particularly her immediate romantic embrace of Ben Affleck‘s amiable, blue-collar Charlestown shlub, particularly after he confesses that he’s a bank robber?

Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall in The Town

The script is basically about Affleck’s felon seeking a kind of redemption from Hall, but I didn’t believe a woman like her — cautious, business-suity, emotionally balanced — would pick an Irish lunchbox townie as her main squeeze, much less stay with him after learning he’s a criminal sociopath.

I touched upon this in my initial 9.9 review from the Toronto Film Festival.

Single women in the banking industry are exposed to (and therefore have a decent shot at hooking up with) yuppie professional types with much higher potential incomes than most Charlestown chowderheads. And a woman like Hall would certainly run in the opposite direction once she realizes the guy is a hair-trigger adolescent who doesn’t get that armed robbery is going to destroy his life in record time, and who is blind to this realization because he believes that being tight and close with townie pallies is more important than any kind of rational evaluation of priorities. I mean, c’mon.

A woman who would be able to roll with Affleck and his manic, self-destructive lifestyle would have to be a little bit manic and self-destructive herself — it’s that simple. A woman like Hall would have never gotten a job as a bank officer if she had emotional makeup that would allow for falling in love with a sociopathic edge-junkie chowderhead — it’s also that simple. This is why The Town, which is fairly well made and obviously jolting from time to time, didn’t work for me. I’d love to hear how it could work for anyone.