We take up the peculiar tale of Ben Affleck after Gigli, his ill-fated but curiously alluring 2003 lesbian hitman romantic comedy buddy comedy epic with the diva god-dess Jennifer Lopez. His next movie, Paycheck, was surprisingly good. Not Good Will Hunting-good or Dazed & Confused-good, but considerably better than your average science fiction thriller in which a man’s memory is wiped clean and he’s forced to race (preferably on a totally kickass motorcycle) against the clock, with the aid of a beautiful woman, to uncover the truth before the military/corporate/revolutionary conspiracy destroys the last best hope of civilization.
Affleck’s next film, Jersey Girl, wasn’t so good but it was notable for its surprisingly apt casting of George Carlin as the crotchety but lovable old dad and of Liv Tyler as the stunningly hot woman who is somehow entirely believable as a small town video store clerk who has needy/pity sex with the hangdog Affleck (though, now that I think about it, she’d already demonstrated her believability as a stunningly beautiful small town record store clerk in Empire Records, so maybe the casting wasn’t all that much of a coup; also, now that I think about it, it’s kind of weird that not long after Jersey Girl she played a stunningly beautiful small town nurse who had needy/pity sex with depressive Casey Affleck, Ben’s younger brother, in Lonesome Jim; I wonder if there’s another Affleck out there for Tyler to have needy/pity sex with; I wonder if I could pass myself off as another Affleck).
Anyhoo ? Affleck’s next movie was Surviving Christmas, which was very very bad but so bad on the face of it that you almost felt more warmly toward Affleck for even giving it the college try after he realized, as he must have not long after shooting commenced, that it was so very very bad.
Then there was Man About Town, which, I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen, and which, let’s be honest, you haven’t seen either. And then there was Clerks II, which had its moments, and Hollywoodland, in which Affleck acted well (even if the movie was problematic). And Smokin’ Aces, which wasn’t great but wasn’t Affleck’s fault.
The problem for Ben Affleck is ultimately two-fold. The first fold is that he cleans up too nicely—with those broad shoulders and that cleft chin he looks like a top-shelf leading man when the truth is that his particular talents (which haven’t quite been understood yet, though there’s a research team in Peru hard at work on the project) are more suited to being a character actor or a leading man in quirkier, more domestic movies. The second fold is that way too much of Armageddon’s phenomenal success was attributed to him, and he ended up on the A-list, where he doesn’t belong. He’s good at something—he was appealing in Good Will Hunting, had a nice cameo in Boiler Room, and was interesting in Chasing Amy—but nobody, least of all Affleck himself, has figured out what that thing is yet.
