A Sunny Day Like Today (movie review of The Town)

This article contains spoilers. If reading them might impair your enjoyment of the movie, please consider waiting to read this until after you have seen the movie.

One way to parse this movie is as a study of the ways human beings threaten one another, and seek to protect each other.

In the opening scene, we witness a group of armed robbers holding up an armored car and a bank. One of the gang members shoots a guard connected with the armored car and beats a bank executive unconscious. While a female bank manager struggles to remember and dial the correct combination to open the vault, he threatens her, flustering her further.

Another member of the gang helps her to calm and focus so she can successfully open the vault, protecting her and helping her achieve her goal of complying with the gang's demands in order to protect her coworkers and customers in the bank. The gang then takes her hostage and escapes with the loot. They release her, unharmed, blindfolded, and terrorized.

At this early point in the movie, before we have names for any of these characters, we're already beginning to know who they are. Jem is volatile and violent. Doug is stable and strong. Claire is caught between her loyalty to her employer (the bank) and her desire to survive this ordeal.

When the gang gathers for a follow up meeting, Jem flashes Claire's driver license and states his concern that she might be able to identify them to the FBI. He suggests the possibility of killing her. Wanting to protect her, Doug says that he'll handle the situation and takes the license from Jem.

We see the gang members delivering the money from the robbery to their "boss", Fergie, who operates out of a florist shop. We also learn about Doug's relationship with Jem's sister, Krista, and how Jem, Krista, and Doug grew up together.

Doug encounters Claire in a laundromat and she approaches him to ask for change. He takes the opportunity to begin a relationship with her, not telling her that he's a member of the gang that robbed her bank and terrorized her.

As they tell each other about themselves, we learn about Doug and Claire. Claire mentions that her brother died of cancer on "a day like today," that is, a sunny day. Doug tells Claire that his mother left him and his father years before. Based on clues he found after she left, he thinks she went to Tangerine, Florida. He begins to plot his escape from the life in which he feels caught and invites Claire to accompany him. She encourages him and agrees to come.

Jem, on the other hand, apparently feels threatened by Doug's desire to leave. Jem is insistent that Doug must participate in the gang's next job and threatens Doug, pulling a gun on him and recounting his killing of another person years ago, to protect Doug. Jem mentions the nine years he spent in prison for this killing to emphasize Doug's debt to him. Doug tells Jem he's grateful but reiterates his intention to leave Boston, telling Jem, "You'll have to shoot me in the back," and walks away.

Doug's relationship with his father is ambiguous. On the one hand, his father is dishonest (lying about what happened to his mother) and expresses impatient contempt for Doug's continued love and desire for his mother. On the other hand, Doug learns from Fergie the florist that his mother committed suicide in despair over her enforced drug addiction. In retrospect, perhaps Doug's father was trying to protect his son from the pain of this knowledge.

Fergie the florist, the controller of the gang, who gives them their jobs and instructions, brags to Doug that he "castrated" Doug's father "the chemical way" (meaning through the mother's drug addiction). He did this when Doug's father tried to escape from under Fergie's thumb and go his own way. Fergie is telling Doug that he (Doug) has no option other than to obey him (Fergie) if he wants Claire to stay healthy. Fergie used Doug's mother (and probably threats against Doug as well) as leverage over Doug's father. Seemingly, Fergie's threat against Claire is effective against Doug as well since Doug gives in and agrees to help with the next job Fergie has planned.

In a separate thread, we see FBI special agent Adam Frawley relating to Claire in a protective way at first. Later, after he becomes aware of her relationship with Doug, he becomes threatening, telling her, "Now you need a lawyer." Of course, her relationship with Doug was completely innocent on her part since she had no way of knowing that he was one of the bank robbers. Once she finds out who Doug is, she tries to throw him out of her apartment, telling him she never wants to see him again.

The story comes to a climax with the gang's final job, stealing 3.5 million dollars from Fenway Park. Agent Frawley has persuaded Krista to tell him about the final job and when the gang prepare to leave the parking garage with the loot in an ambulance, they discover they are surrounded by police and a massive firefight erupts. After watching the other three members of his gang die under police fire, Doug (dressed as a police officer) slips into a police cruiser and drives away.

We see him kill Fergie's bodyguard and then Fergie. As Fergie is dying, Doug reminds him of his comment about "clipping [Doug's father's] nuts" and aims his gun at Fergie's crotch. We hear the shot and the screen goes black.

We see Claire in her apartment, surrounded by FBI agents. She is "helping in the investigation." Her cell phone rings. It's Doug. Agent Frawley leans close as she tells Doug that she wants to see him. Can he come over? We know that Doug abused her trust but we're still disappointed that she's willing to sell Doug out. We see Doug talking on the phone to Claire and looking through a window with binoculars. He sees the FBI agents. He knows she's betraying him.

Finally, Claire tells him that if comes to the back door of her apartment building in an hour, it will be like a "sunny day". We realize that this is her way of warning Doug off, seeking to protect him.

In the last scenes of the movie, we see Claire find the duffel bag of money Doug left for her, with a tangerine in the bottom. We see the refurbished skating rink, dedicated to Doug's mom, that she uses the money to pay for anonymously. We see Doug watching the sunset from his cabin on the beach, presumably in Tangerine, Florida.

The Town shows the corrosive and damaging nature of coercive threats, and the power and preciousness of the impulse to protect.

Questions for comment:

Was Doug's escape a cop out or the only option available to him?

How would you feel about finding a bag full of money left over from a bank robbery? What would you do with it?