I rewatched "The Town," and there's no way Joe Mazzulla watches it four times a week
But the Celtics head coach is onto something, because the movie is definitely sports. It's also Boston porn.
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here, so we’re just gonna dive right in. This week, a clip from January started making the internet rounds. In it, former Celtic-turned-TV-analyst Brian Scalabrine is interviewing Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla.
Scalabrine says to camera, “Joe Mazzulla is obsessed with the movie The Town, says he watches it four times a week.”
Then he turns to Mazzulla and asks, “How does that relate to the Celtics?”
“I mean, it’s just a mindset,” Mazzulla says. “A Boston mindset.”
There’s no way Mazzulla watches this movie four times a week. First of all, it’s Scalabrine who says that Mazzulla says he watches the 2010 movie four times a week. Mazzulla doesn’t say it. In response, Mazzulla sort of laughs. I have to believe someone is being hyperbolic here.
Because, listen: The Town is two hours and four minutes long. Last I checked, Mazzulla is a full-time basketball coach in the NBA who also happens to be married with two children. I am not a head coach, I do not have children, my life is fairly flexible, and even I don’t have eight hours and sixteen minutes each week to spend watching The Town. That’s a full workday of just watching The Town.
That being said, one thing’s for sure: Mazzulla definitely loves The Town. At a post-game presser after the Celtics absolutely destroyed the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, Mazzulla wore a sweatshirt that says, “Whose car we gonna take.” The garment refers to this scene:
The message is basically: If I’m your ride-or-die, I’m your ride-or-die unconditionally. It makes sense that a coach would latch onto that. Especially since Boston has been playing basketball so erratically these playoffs and Mazzulla’s coaching has been called into question. Mazzulla found a rallying cry that doesn’t have to do with drawing up plays or calling timeouts and instead speaks to the most die-hard definition of what it means to be a true team.
The movie is also simply as Boston as it gets, and Mazzulla is from Rhode Island, which is in the Boston extended universe. If you’re from New England and you were in high school or college when The Town and The Departed came out, they were formative experiences. Mazzulla and I are both 34*. It’s not our fault.
*Wanna feel unaccomplished? Why aren’t you a head coach in the NBA?
The Town was co-written, directed, and starred in by Boston’s Best Boy, Ben Affleck. Look, I love Ben Affleck. I don’t know if we’re supposed to anymore, but I can’t help it. His Dunkin commercials? His dejected airs? His constant wearing of Boston sports apparel? What’s not to love!
Also, Affleck is also very good at making movies. (Did you see Air? You should see Air, which Affleck also directed, about Michael Jordan and Nike. It’s just a fun movie, and most studios don’t make fun movies anymore. I digress.)
But I couldn’t remember if The Town was a good movie. I just remembered watching it as a junior at my small New England college and thinking, “Boston is so metal.” I didn’t, however, have the best judgement in college, so I needed to revisit.
Which brings me to the second reason I can’t believe Mazzulla watches this movie four times a week: It is about as intense as a close Game 7. The emotional exhaustion would be too much.
Seriously! My heart was pounding for the entire last hour of this film when I watched it yesterday. I think it is a good movie. I cried at the end. I cried! How embarrassing! But, I will say, the “Boston is metal” feeling holds up, whether it’s true or not.
It’s that feeling that I think Mazzulla is trying to get at. The Town is basically just Boston porn, as are so many of the films set there. Before it was gentrified within an inch of its life, Boston and the surrounding areas were the perfect place to shoot tough, blue-collar movies about messed-up white people. I’m talking Tha Depahted, Mystic Rivah, Black Mass, The Fightah, even Good Will Hunting. (In The Town, Ben Affleck’s character says he lives at 551 Bunker Hill Street in Charlestown, and his house looks pretty ramshackle. According to Zillow, a house there today would start at around two million bucks).
Films love to exaggerate and romanticize Boston’s fading, specific flavor of grit. It’s that Northeastern “kind, but not nice” attitude. It’s the dive bars with darts in the back and a surly bartender with a thick Boston accent in front. It’s flipping people off as you whip around rotaries. It’s “how do you like them apples?” It’s casting zero to two people of color and putting in some questionable lines of dialogue that could be meant to show Boston in all its ugliness, or could just be lazy writing.
But, more than anything, the backdrop to these movies that provides the local flavor and the real grounding is — you guessed it, sports.
The Town is as sporty as a movie can get without being a movie about sports (light spoilers ahead, but the film is 13 years old, so). In one of the first scenes, Ben Affleck wears a sick Bruins zip-up, and then he wears a swishy Red Sox jacket in the next. He and his buddies meet in an abandoned hockey rink. His character played briefly in the NHL! As for Jeremy Renner’s character, he wears a Celtics track jacket for the first half of the film.
Renner is actually wearing the Celtics jacket when he says, “whose cah we gonna take?,” a fact no one is talking about enough.
But the pièce de résistance is that Affleck and Renner plan a heist at FENWAY PARK. You heard that right. On a Monday, they go to steal all the money spent by “60,000 people after a four-game stand with New York.” A massive shootout in the Fenway concourse ensues after the cops** trap our renegade heroes. And right before the gunfire starts, Affleck says, “The last motherfucker who robbed the Red Sox like this was Jack Clark.”
He is referring, of course, to “Jack the Ripper,” the designated hitter who signed a big, three-year deal with the Sox in 1991 and then played so badly that the team waived him after his second season. Always time for a sports joke, even when the SWAT team is bearing down on you.
**And by cops I mean Jon Hamm with his Mad Men-era haircut; people forget that this movie was made during a time when it was hard to picture Hamm as anyone other than Don Draper
The Town is effective because of the film’s specificity and its toughness, both of which are rapidly disappearing from its real-life setting. Its references were so correct that an outrageous heist movie became somewhat believable. Affleck built a world he knew and is so good at his job that we all strap in for the ride.
So maybe Mazzulla is picking up on that sense of place and urgency as the Celtics battle it out with the Miami Heat for a trip to the NBA Finals. Perhaps he’s clinging to the idea of Boston’s gritty heart (he seems to appreciate grit).
Or, it could be that Mazzulla is just drawn to a film in which loyalty is everything, the stakes are as high as they can be, and you will lose immediately if you don’t stay vigilant.
Sounds familiar. Go Celtics.