The rise and fall and rise again of Ben Affleck
If you think Ben Affleck’s career may peak in Batman’s blackand-grey one-piece, you clearly haven’t seen him in the Superman suit. Affleck hasn’t played the Man of Steel, exactly, but he has played a man who played him: George Reeves, the lanternjawed television star whose life ended in shadowy circumstances in 1959.
Critics have been harsh on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — starring Affleck as Batman and Henry Cavill as Superman — but the movie swept the box office on its opening weekend.
Affleck’s turn as Superman comes in Allen Coulter’s 2006 noir thriller Hollywoodland, which Affleck made when his own life was at its direst ebb, in both personal and professional terms. Three years earlier, a run of five stink bombs — including two all-time debacles, Gigli and Daredevil — had left him all but uncastable.
His glaringly high-profile relationship with Jennifer Lopez meant he’d become mostly an overexposed celebrity. And there was still another year to go before Gone Baby Gone — Affleck’s first film as director, and a work of honest, sturdy, hand-built moviemaking — would kick-start his redemption.
So for the time being, Affleck played what he knew. At the end of Hollywoodland, Reeves’s agent, played by Jeffrey DeMunn, eulogizes his late client in words that could just as easily have been spoken about Affleck himself:
“A charming man,” he sighs. “Funny, handsome — not like the (more fashionable actors) today, all the squinting and the mumbling. A movie-star face! Why wasn’t he one? Where he wound up, it should have been enough, right? Enough for a life?”
Reeves was 45 years old when he died. Affleck was 34 when he played him. He’d reached what felt like the natural end of a decadelong Hollywood career, capped by lead roles in three international smash-hit blockbusters, a supporting appearance in an Academy Award-winning best picture, Shakespeare in Love, and an Oscar, shared with Matt Damon, for writing Good Will Hunting.
But that was not enough for Affleck, so he kept going. Ten years on, he has another Oscar: a best picture award of his own this time, for the political thriller Argo.
Other than his work in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Affleck in Hollywoodland gives probably the best performance of his career — in part because you can taste what’s at stake.
That might sound cruel, but it’s in keeping with the film itself, which is partly about the way movies feed on the public images of the stars who make them, and how brittle those images can be.
Affleck’s own movie-star image took a while to emerge. He worked as a child actor from the age of seven and after the usual round of kids’ TV and fast-food ads, Affleck realized he made a convincing bully. He made his breakthrough in Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age masterpiece Dazed and Confused as O’Bannion, a cocky high-school senior who prowls around with a wooden paddle, hunting for freshmen to spank. Affleck also played bullies in School Ties (1992) and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995).
Good Will Hunting was a landmark in both Damon and Affleck’s careers: It was nominated for nine Oscars and won two. Was there anything these two young guys couldn’t do? The answer turned out to be surprising — not least because in the immediate aftermath of Good Will Hunting, it was Affleck’s star that soared.
Super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer saw blockbuster potential in him, and persuaded a reluctant Michael Bay to cast him opposite Bruce Willis in Armageddon, a film about plucky oil drillers saving Earth from an asteroid.
Affleck is physically enormous — 6-foot-4 and heavy-set — but he’s also a thoughtful performer, which sometimes exasperated Bay. “I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers,” Affleck reminisces on Armageddon’s DVD commentary. “And he told me to shut the f--- up, so that was the end of that talk.”
Armageddon was a half-billiondollar hit, as was Affleck’s second collaboration with Bay, the atrociously reviewed but wildly popular war epic Pearl Harbor. Try to recall anything about the characters Affleck played in either of these films, though, and you can’t.
Then there’s Daredevil, Affleck’s first comic-book movie. Mystifyingly, it was gently received at the time and it scraped into profit. But now it’s almost unwatchably bad, full of plot holes and risible scenes, including one in which Affleck, as the blind hero, Matt Murdock, literally smells his co-star (and future wife) Jennifer Garner coming down the street from inside a café.
Three more dreadful potboilers followed in quick succession and the way ahead became clear. Affleck had to vanish — allow his star to cool, jettison his leadingman status and focus on an ambition that had been incubating since the Dazed and Confused days: to direct a film of his own. So for two years, he was nowhere to be seen. The world moved on, and so could he. His underdog best picture win in 2013 for Argo was the ultimate Hollywood vindication.
The fuss around his acceptance speech centred on his candid description of his marriage to Garner, which ended last June, as “work, but the best kind of work.”
But if you were listening carefully, you would have also heard him thank Martin Brest, the director of Midnight Run, Beverly Hills Cop and Gigli, Affleck’s single most derided work. Paying tribute to his lowest point at his moment of triumph felt, somehow, like elemental Affleck. It was the dark night that made the Dark Knight and the new dawn possible.