Aubrey MaloneThe Accountant (15A)
The idea of an inhibited accountant whose social skills are zilch becoming a Robin Hood-style action hero cum serial killer might appear far-fetched on paper but the production qualities of this beguiling film are so quality-studded you end up buying it – just about.
If the art of effective acting is the ability to do nothing well then Ben Affleck, whose good looks all too often have prevented critics from taking him as seriously as they should in the past, is very effective indeed. Giving a tight-lipped performance as Christian Wolff, a taciturn accountant working with some seriously dangerous criminals, his harnessed energy threatens to burst forth at every turn.
When it does it’s almost with bashful overtones as he gives one of his semi-apologetic grins. Notwithstanding this, he manages to persuade us that the wildly divergent parabolas of his character do, in the end, cohere into a real 3D person as the Treasury Department threatens to expose a multi-million dollar empire he carefully conceals behind a modest-looking lifestyle.
The film isn’t without its faults. It’s uneven for one thing and elliptical for another. There are also too many convolutions in the plot. But if you let the details of drug cartels and money laundering wash above your head there are riches galore to be sampled here.
It’s all whipped up with atmospheric elan by director Gavin O’Connor. Apart from Affleck the cast includes Anna Kendrick as a conscientious clerk who discovers accounting irregularities in a prosthetics firm and ends up getting her head on the chopping block for her troubles. Veteran John Lithgow (always worth the admission price) is suitably enigmatic as its owner.
Wolff too is enigmatic – think Keyser Soze from Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. Someone he resembles even more is the timid mathematician played by Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs, his landmark ‘mouse that roared’ role. Wolff also shares much in common with another Hoffman character, the autistic savant of Rainman.
The 15A cert is because of the violence. Should Wolff’s aggressive streak be condoned by his autism? Or a youth that saw his father placing undue kick-boxing demands on him so he’d be able to stand up to bullies by pulverising them?
The film asks more questions than it answers but it makes for compelling viewing nonetheless. Affleck affects an almost samurai-like calm even in the midst of his self-harming and his mind-boggling accounting procedures. His understated performance reminds us of the talent he displayed in The Town, his best movie to date for me.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson plays the woman who leads FBI chief Ray King (J.K.Simmons) to Wolff’s fortress-like retreat. She’s blackmailed into the job by King after lying to him but once she gets her teeth into it she becomes fascinated.
So will you if you give yourself over to the film’s abstruse permutations. Don’t get too bogged down by the storyline. Immerse yourself in its mesmeric mood instead.
Very Good ****