Can Ben Affleck revive his career... again?

Ben Affleck is making a comeback... again. Affleck’s career over the past 25 years has been a continual roller coaster of successes followed by reversals followed by successes. One year, he will be the coming man. The next, he’ll be labelled as a has-been. He is at once the likeable all-American, next-door type and the seedy neighbour from hell to avoid at all costs. Critics either rave about his films or mock him mercilessly. His two Oscars (for Good Will Hunting and Argo) are neatly counter-balanced by his Razzies – his Worst Actor award in 2003 for his combined efforts on Daredevil, Gigli and Paycheck and the Worst Screen Couple award he picked up with Jennifer Lopez for Gigli, one of the most reviled films of recent times. He also shared a Worst Screen Combo award, alongside Henry Cavill, for his efforts as Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Affleck’s private life is scrutinised every bit as intently as his screen performances – and he is often judged to have come up short there as well. Gossip columnists treat him as their own pet celebrity punch bag as he goes through a divorce, floundering relationships, being accused of groping, or getting caught drunk on camera. He may have been on Harvey Weinstein’s “Red Flag” list of those Weinstein feared were briefing journalists against him but he also worked many times with the disgraced producer. His former co-star Rose McGowan accused him of lying about the extent of his knowledge of Weinstein’s sexual abuse of women.

It looks, however, as if Affleck’s oscillating career is currently on one of its periodic upturns. His 2010 Boston-set gangster movie The Town, which he directed as well as starred in, has been finding new fans on Netflix. (It was the second most-watched movie on the streaming platform last weekend.) Affleck and his old friend Matt Damon, together with Nicole Holofcener, recently co-scripted Ridley Scott’s new medieval-set period drama, The Last Duel. Affleck and Damon will star alongside Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer and Adam Driver. The film’s shooting was postponed indefinitely because of the pandemic but Affleck is to be seen later in the year opposite Ana de Armas, the young star of Knives Out, in Adrian Lyne’s erotic mystery-thriller, Deep Water, the latest film adapted from the works of crime writer Patricia Highsmith.

Affleck is now dating De Armas – and is again being pursued by the paparazzi just as he was during his relationship with Lopez and marriage to Jennifer Garner. As The Washington Post recently noted, even during the Covid-19 crisis, when “people have little patience for the daily activities of wealthy celebrities while the country is in turmoil”, the fascination with Affleck hasn’t abated in the slightest. Those who don’t like him as an actor or a personality still want to see his movies and to read about his private life.

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Deep Water finished shooting before the lockdown began and is due be released in British cinemas in November. Affleck also has other projects on the boil including a long-gestating adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, which he is due to direct and star in. This week, UK audiences can finally catch up with him in the aptly titled Finding the Way Back, whose cinema release was delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic but which Warner Bros are putting out on VOD.

The film, directed by Gavin O’Connor, boasts one of Affleck’s finest screen performances. The story may be a little corny but it packs a considerable emotional punch. Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a roughneck construction worker who, in the early scenes, bears a strong resemblance both to the concert pianist turned oil rigger played by Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces and to Stacy Keach’s alcoholic ex-boxer in John Huston’s Fat City. Jack drinks all the time, at work, and at home. The back seat in his car is a makeshift storage facility for his beer. His thermos is full of vodka, not coffee. He keeps cans of lager in the soap holder in the shower. He is bearded, paunchy, and has a look of near-permanent misery about him, even when he is trying to tell salacious jokes in the bar where he gets legless every evening. As we eventually discover, there has been tragedy and turmoil in his private life.

This is the kind of role that you can’t play convincingly unless you have lived it. “Shame is really toxic. There is no positive by-product of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing,” Affleck commented in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year to support the US release of the film. He wasn’t talking about playing Jack Cunningham. The subject of his remarks was himself. Like Jack in the film, he had been through a recent divorce, from Garner in 2018. He spoke frankly in the interview about his father’s drinking, his own alcoholism, his relapses, and about how “therapeutic” it had been to play someone like Jack.

Of course, the film isn’t just an excuse for Affleck to pursue catharsis by acting as someone wallowing in inebriated self-pity. It’s also a sports movie and, as its title suggests, a story about redemption. Jack was a teenage basketball star who frittered away a potential NBA career to spite his father. When he is at his lowest ebb, the priest at his old Catholic high school asks him to come back and coach the school team. The team is on a prolonged losing streak. Its players are short on skills, physical stature and self-belief. Using some Phil Jackson-like strategy and motivational techniques, Jack turns them around. Soon, they are in with a shot of reaching the playoffs for the first time since he was the lead player more than 20 seasons before. In helping the team, Jack partially conquers his own demons.

We may have seen it all before but Affleck is just as convincing as the hard-driving coach as he is as the emotionally wounded drunk. He plays the role with a soulfulness and intensity that wasn’t there when he starred as a misanthropic-seeming Bruce Wayne/Batman in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017). For all its maudlin moments, the film has grit and integrity which some of his glossier star vehicles lack.

This is far from the first time that Affleck has put his career back on track by tackling a character role in a downbeat drama after a series of high profile, big-budget disappointments. In the “Bennifer years”, when he was still reeling from the reviews for Gigli (“awe-inspiringly, world-historically awful” as one of the kinder reviewers put it) and being written about more for his relationship with Lopez than for anything he achieved on screen, he regained his artistic credibility by starring in Hollywoodland (2006). In the film, which won him a Golden Globe nomination and a Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival, he played the ill-fated minor Hollywood star George Reeves, best known as TV’s Superman in the 1950s.

Reeves, who died in what appeared to be a suicide in 1959 as his career stuttered, was a celebrity struggling to be taken seriously. Critics were quick to spot the parallels between Affleck and the character he played.

“There is a real paradox involved. That makes it easier for an actor because the audience’s interest is automatically piqued. You want to explore how this guy, who is a model of strength and masculinity and confidence, can in fact be tormented, miserable and unhappy,” Affleck commented of his role as Reeves. The same remarks can be applied to Jack in Finding the Way Back and to the star playing him. Both films are about alpha males fallen on hard times. There is an obvious pathos in seeing once successful or famous characters making a mess of their lives. It is heartening for audiences, too, to see actors who’ve fallen on hard times redeem themselves, even when they do so playing failures.

Ever since Good Will Hunting (1997), Affleck has mixed and matched between big studio films and more daring independent-spirited features, as well as action films and character-driven dramas. He’ll make Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and superhero movies while also working with directors like Terrence Malick and Kevin Smith. It is typical of his career that his hits and misses will often appear side by side. Earlier this year, at the same time the reviewers were hailing Affleck in Finding the Way Back, they were dismissing him as “embarrassingly stilted” in the film adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, a new political thriller released on Netflix.

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It’s as hard to get a handle on Affleck as a director as it is on him as an actor. He will continually surprise us with his choice of material and will either exceed or fall below expectations. His directorial debut feature, Gone, Baby, Gone (2007), a dark thriller adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel, focused on a child’s abduction. The UK release was delayed for several months because of similarities to the real-life case of Madeleine McCann, the young British girl who disappeared in Portugal in the summer of 2007. The material may have been very sombre but critics responded to its moral complexity, the edgy direction, and to the nuanced, affecting performance Affleck elicited from his brother Casey Affleck as the private investigator searching for the missing kid.

Gone Baby Gone, like The Town, Good Will Hunting, and the recent Kevin Bacon TV cop series City on a Hill (which Affleck produced) was set in Massachusetts, where he and Damon grew up. Boston brings out the best in Affleck as a filmmaker and he gravitates towards the city. It was a mystery, though, how his big-budget 1920s Boston-set gangster epic Live By Night (which he produced, directed and starred in) ended up seeming so bland and so dull.

To his detractors, Affleck has always seemed prey to a certain narcissism. In his more conventional leading man roles, in mainstream romances and dramas, he can appear arch and smug. He is no Cary Grant and the charm doesn’t always come easily. However, in films in which he is playing more troubled characters, he invariably excels. Whenever he endures reversals and humiliations, whether it’s in his professional or private life, he always draws on them. That is why he is able to keep on bouncing off the canvas. With Affleck, the most abject failures are generally the prelude to the next successes. The harder he falls in one film, the better he will be in the next.

‘Finding the way Back’ is out on VOD