When it came to the distribution of Affleck family traits, Ben got the height, the chin and the swaggering Hollywood charm — but little bro Casey got the intensity.
In the film “Out of the Furnace,” out Wednesday, Casey Affleck plays a veteran who’s been through four tours overseas, can’t get a job and resorts to underground brawling to make ends meet.
At one point, while talking with his brother, played by Christian Bale, Casey’s character snaps.
“I gave my life for this country, and what’s it done for me?!?” he shrieks, unleashing a wail of bone-shaking misery. The scene is harrowing. His desperation stabs your heart.
And he’s the only Affleck you can imagine pulling it off.
Yes, Ben has his talents as a director. And it’s not that he’s a consistently bad actor — but he’ll never be a great one. Whereas Casey, 1-0 over his brother in acting-related Oscar nods, is always breathtaking.
Ben, 41, has a comfort zone — self-assured, occasionally smarmy — and within it he can be compelling: think “Dazed and Confused,” “The Town” and “Argo.”
But even in those films, his is never the best performance (respectively, Matthew McConaughey, Jeremy Renner and John Goodman steal the shows). If Ben — slated to play Batman, much to the Internet’s chagrin — manages to give the Caped Crusader gravitas, he’ll surely be overshadowed by one of the villains.
In “The Town,” which Ben received kudos for directing, he plays a bank-robbing thug. He beats people up, he shoots them, he even cons a lover. But never does he come off as menacing.
Slate wrote that, with “Affleck’s limited resources as a thespian, the optimum solution would have been for Renner to play both roles.” His hometown paper, the Boston Globe, said that of all the Boston accents in the film, Affleck’s felt “the most forced.”
And those are notices for his good films.
A list of his negative reviews for “Gigli” could fill this page. And for his latest failure, October’s “Runner Runner,” which has yet to break $20 million at the box office and has an astoundingly bad Rotten Tomatoes score of just nine percent, Rolling Stone said that Affleck “. . . isn’t directing this time, just acting, and that just barely.”
Meanwhile, there’s an edge to Casey, 38, an angst that his brother will never have.
In “The Killer Inside Me,” Casey plays Lou, a deputy who is secretly a murderous psychopath. The film got mixed reviews and outraged many for its violence against women, as Lou kills both of the women in his life, played by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, by brutally beating them, with a look on his face like he’s executing a particularly annoying household chore.
He is, in a word, terrifying. Whatever people’s feelings on the film, few walked away unaffected by Casey. Roger Ebert wrote that he was “frightening” and “so convincing.”
Casey’s role as a detective in “Gone Baby Gone,” which Ben directed, led the Village Voice to call him “a major talent coming into his own.” And his turn in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Watching the brothers’ darker roles back-to-back, the difference is stark. If you knew that Casey Affleck was walking behind you, you might just look over your shoulder out of fear for your safety. If you heard it was Ben, you’d look over to see if you could get him in the background of a selfie.
It’s possible to predict the notices Ben will likely get for Batman: “stoic,” “contained” and “he’s no Christian Bale.” To ensure that someone in the cast will pop off the screen, how about Casey as Robin?
It won’t be stoic. It won’t be contained. And it just might, to the delight of Batman fans worldwide, goose big brother Ben into stepping up his game.