Superhero CPA in ‘The Accountant’ – Affleck terrific fit to play autistic assassin

This news has been read 5225 times!

In Gavin O’Connor’s “The Accountant”, starring Ben Affleck, the paper-pushing CPA — roughly the exact opposite of Schwarzenegger or Stallone — gets his shot at action hero stardom. If we pull out our calculators, we can deduce that the odds of this are slim. Carrying the one and rounding up, you might even conclude that it’s a patently ridiculous premise.

Just imagine the tagline possibilities. “The only thing he knows better than the tax code is his moral code!” “Don’t write him off!” “He’s the Price Waterhouse Killer!”

But “The Accountant” has much grander goals of implausibility. The film comes from a script by Bill Dubuque (“The Judge”) that, come tax season, may well be at serious risk of an audit. It’s about a secretive, autistic accountant for prominent criminals who’s a muscular, military-grade hit man by hobby, plagued by his father’s relentlessly militaristic parenting, who becomes embroiled in a robotic prostheses company’s bid to go public. You know, that old story.

To cite the words exclaimed by John Lithgow’s CEO at a climactic moment that’s both bloodbath and family reunion: “What is this?”

What “The Accountant” is is one of the more unlikely movies to repeat the phrase “Just the Renoir”. Christian Wolff (Affleck) is on the surface a small-town accountant outside Chicago who spends his days at his bland shopping center office and his nights in an airstream trailer parked inside a storage unit. There he punishes himself with a bar he painfully rolls over his shins and stares quietly at an original Pollack nailed to the ceiling. (His Renoir is deemed more expendable.)

Supernatural

He has amassed the hidden fortune as an accountant for hire to drug cartels, money launderers and the mafia. His liaisons are set up by an unseen operative who communicates with Wolff only by phone. When it comes time to sift through documents, Wolff — like a pianist preparing for Beethoven — blows on his finger tips and dives in. He is, one client swears, “almost supernatural” in his ability to run numbers and smell out who’s cooking the books.

“My boy’s wicked smart”, another Affleck bragged of Matt Damon’s mathematician in “Good Will Hunting”. Whereas Damon went on to play an assassin with amnesia in the Bourne films, Affleck’s equally lethal mercenary is distinct for his place on the spectrum.

Filling the movie are flashbacks to Wolff’s childhood, when his army father (Robert C. Treveiler) refused to accept his autistic son’s differences. Instead, he raises him and his brother like soldiers, training them with specialists. It’s a quirky method of parenting sure to spawn a best-seller: less homework, more pentjak silat (the Indonesian fighting style).

The origin story — complete with a bizarre but formative stint in prison with a cameo from Jeffrey Tambor — plays like a superhero’s. Many of the characters, too, feel straight out of a comic book: J.K. Simmons’ Treasury Department investigator, Jon Bernthal’s over-inflated enforcer, Anna Kendrick’s accounting clerk, the movie’s lone smiler.

Affleck’s hulking, number-crunching CPA is no less severe than his Batman. The actor plays him deliberately flat, with an unrelentingly even voice and a dispassionate, anti-social blankness. As was the case in “Batman vs Superman”, he’s better than the overcooked soup he’s swimming in.

There are legitimate objections to be raised about a film like “The Accountant” treating the autistic like savants. But there are genuine gestures here about accepting the gifts of people with autism, and it’s worth noting how unusual such territory is for a Hollywood thriller — something O’Connor (“Warrior”, “Pride and Glory”) knows how to firmly construct.

“The Accountant” is, if nothing else, singular in lending an action-movie cliche an absurdly peculiar and elaborate backstory. “I like incongruity”, Wolff says in one scene. “The Accountant” does, too, but maybe a bit too much.

“The Accountant”, a Warner Bros release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “strong violence and language throughout”. Running time: 128 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Say what you will about Affleck as Batman, or Jack Ryan, or any number of other action heroes that have seemed to be a stretch for the boy-next-door star, but Affleck is a terrific fit for “The Accountant”, in which he plays an autistic assassin. Though his choice in material is strong, the actor has always been a strange kind of thespian, one who seems so normal and non-actorly that most of his performances feel like watching one of your buddies up on screen, pretending to be someone he’s not. Here,: It’s like Will Hunting and Jason Bourne rolled into one, brains and bullets. What’s not to love?

Admirers

Based on a deliciously pulpy Black List screenplay by Bill Dubuque, “The Accountant” was one of those projects that admirers imagined would never get made — and maybe they had a point, seeing as how the script casually assumes that someone with Asperger’s Syndrome is potentially wired to become a ruthless killing machine. In the wrong hands, the screenplay could have been as controversial as Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” was with the trans community. But here, director O’Connor (“Warrior”) demonstrates the right way to handle such material, elevating what is essentially an exploitation movie into a zen character study, one that takes its pound-of-flesh antihero seriously.

A suitable analogy might be the film that remains M. Night Shyamalan’s best, 2000’s all-but-forgotten superhero prologue “Unbreakable”. Like that film, “The Accountant” is built almost entirely upon exposition as Dubuque juggles no fewer than four separate story threads: He gives us Wolff’s current assignment, which involves “uncooking” the books at a company called Living Robotics whose founder (John Lithgow) uses the company’s benefits to justify the most heinous kind of behavior. At the same time, from the sidelines, Treasury Dept investigator Ray King (J.K. Simmons) enlists a young analyst, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to identify the shady figure who’s been managing the finances of arms dealers, mobsters, and the world’s other most-wanted criminals. (Agencies)

And then he incorporates two separate flashback tracks via which the audience slowly comes to understand how Wolff got to be the way he is, one revealing his extremely complicated childhood (tough love doesn’t come any tougher than the boot camp Wolff’s dad puts him through) and the other, a life-changing stint in Leavenworth, where a disgraced mob accountant (Jeffrey Tambor) teaches his autistic young protege the secrets of money laundering.

Actually, there’s a fifth track woven in for good measure, one involving another equally ruthless assassin, Brax (Jon Bernthal), moving in parallel with Wolff, and seemingly one step ahead of him the whole way. To call this structure complex would be an understatement. Instead, King offers another analogy: “Do you like puzzles?” he asks agent Medina, a woman with her own secrets (secrets that, frankly, aren’t so interesting or relevant, but represent the script’s commitment to creating surprising and multi-faceted characters, even as they spout dialogue that sounds like it ought to be contained in comic-book talk bubbles). “The Accountant” is nothing if not a puzzle — not so much a jigsaw as a three-dimensional brain teaser that gets deeper and stranger with each new revelation.

In the middle of it all is Affleck, an actor whose ultra-low-key demeanor works to the role’s advantage. Here, instead of being asked to emote, he plays an expressionless math prodigy who can multiply big numbers in his head; does his computing with dry-erase markers, “A Beautiful Mind” — style, on big glass windows (the most cinematographic way to do math); and occasionally shoots people point-blank in the temple without even the slightest change in pulse. This cold-blooded latter tendency really seems to satisfy a certain segment of the audience these days, drawing impressed “ooohs” during an advance screening hosted by Beyond Fest in LA, and yet it represents a troubling new trend in action movies — one in which lethal efficiency is something to be celebrated. It’s the way Daniel Craig’s 007 does business, disposing of life as if … well, as if life were disposable.

The already-plausibility-straining movie offers Wolff a chance at redemption: Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), Living Robotics’ in-house accountant, a chipper finance enthusiast who has no idea that her discovery will make her a target for elimination. Wolff, who seems entirely incapable of romance, thaws just enough to reorganize his plans in order to protect her. (Agencies)

By Jake Coyle

This news has been read 5225 times!