The Accountant was
something of a surprise to me. The trailers looked intriguing, but I had little
sense of the plot and knew only that it carried a very strong cast attached to
the project. There’s no accounting for taste, but there’s much about The Accountant that should compound your
interest.Put another way, if we’ve just been through the McConaissance, which saw Matthew McConaughey score big in a slew of major projects, does this mean we’re well and truly in the age of the Benaissance? Has Ben Affleck well and truly (and finally) redeemed himself after Gigli and Jersey Girl? Has the Dark Knight returned?
Ben Affleck stars as the eponymous accountant, Christian Wolff, whose unassuming demeanor conceals his dangerous work as a bookkeeper for the most dangerous illegal operations, cooking the books for drug lords, terrorists, and enemy states. While two Treasury agents (J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) pursue the mysterious accountant, Wolff is hired to investigate the books of a robotic prosthetic company after a low-level employee (Anna Kendrick) reports a revenue leak to her boss (John Lithgow).
Perhaps the key to enjoying The Accountant is not quite knowing what to expect, and the delight of it is that there’s a little bit of everything in this movie. We’ve got espionage, both corporate and political, organized crime and disorganized shootouts, nascent friendships and deep family connections. You might even think of The Accountant as a superhero origin story, showing how Wolff goes from a troubled boy on the autism spectrum to one of the world’s most capable – and surprisingly dangerous – financial analysts. Indeed, we might think of Christian Wolff as an autistic Jason Bourne, with a mathsy dose of Batman sprinkled in for good measure.
(Sidebar, and without going into too much spoilery detail, am I the only one who feels that J.K. Simmons was very much on a trial run for Commissioner Gordon here? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a little bit of this characterization carry over, and I think the hat would be a good fit too.)
I’ve had high praise for Ben Affleck over the last decade or so; he’s evolved into a fine director, and I stand by my statement from back in February that he’s “an excellent choice” for Batman, on whose capable shoulders DC seems to be resting their cinematic franchise. As Wolff, in a portrayal where it might have been easy to phone it in, Affleck does more than one might expect with monotone deadpans and escalating senses of panic brought on by moments where he’s unable to finish a task (his dominant trait, I’d say, is his single-minded devotion to completion). I’ve seen this movie touted as a thriller, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far – it seems to defy categorization in a way that I found refreshing (while others wanted more focus in genre) – I would say that there are thrills to be had when we see Wolff encounter a situation we know is going to trigger him, and we feel that same building tension within ourselves, as when a cleaning crew begins to erase his dry-erase marker work. Credit to Affleck for crafting a character whose reactions are consistent and easy to understand and to anticipate, and credit to director Gavin O’Connor for giving room for Affleck’s performance to shine.
Although there are other wonderful performers in the film – one senses, for example, that Anna Kendrick’s character could have been a downright sidekick in another version of this film, or that Jon Bernthal’s shadowy hitman could dominate a movie all his own – it is first and foremost Affleck’s show, and he handles it with grace. Points for creativity (hat-tip to writer Bill Dubuque for an original and fulfilling script) and points for the wow factor of surprise, but the bottom line is that it’s Affleck’s balance sheet and the rest of the cast are just numbers that add up to one heck of a film.
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