Ben Affleck's ease on screen can read as innocence or as something worse, and he is most alive when a director like David Fincher makes use of the doubt. Behind the camera he is good with actors and too kind to himself.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Nick Dunne trying to be an ordinary husband in Gone Girl (2014). Nothing in Affleck's face is doing very much, and that is the performance: a large, affable man whose friendliness looks like effort, while David Fincher lets us decide whether the effort is guilt or simply a man who has never had to try before. We laughed at the strain in it, then felt uncomfortable at how quickly we had joined the crowd judging him, and the film could not work without that. Affleck's habit is to underplay and let the audience supply the suspicion. When it works, it is the best thing he does.
He arrived as a writer as much as an actor. Good Will Hunting (1997), written with Matt Damon, gave him Chuckie, the friend who says the blunt thing, and the film is funniest in his scenes. Then the studios made him a leading man, in Armageddon (1998), where the tenderness the script asked for came out visible and calculated, and Pearl Harbor (2001). The low point was Gigli (2003), where he pushed bluster at a part that needed none, and we were bored by every line of it. Kevin Smith used him better: Bartleby in Dogma (1999) is an angel who has heard it all before, and Affleck plays the boredom lightly.
The turn came when he went behind the camera. Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town (2010) and Argo (2012) are three good thrillers, all more interested in the people around the hero than in the hero. He lets Amy Ryan make a difficult mother harder to like, gives Alan Arkin and John Goodman room to run their scenes, and gives Jeremy Renner enough danger that Doug MacRay's caution looks like sense. His own performances in those films are steady and thin, and his scripts, with Aaron Stockard and Chris Terrio, keep pleading his character's case. He and his editor William Goldenberg also push the suspense in Argo harder than it needs. Air (2023) is the cleanest of them, quick and funny and shot by Robert Richardson in soft amber, and there is not a frame in it you would remember on the way home.
He has said he finds directing the most satisfying, and it shows: as a director he is patient, sure with his casts and not much curious about what they are leaving unsaid. As an actor he needs someone else to be curious for him. The one performance of his we would send a stranger to is the one where he only had to act.
Biography
Ben Affleck is an American actor and filmmaker. Born on 15 August 1972 in Berkeley, California, he began his career as a child actor in the PBS series The Voyage of the Mimi.
Affleck rose to prominence with his childhood friend Matt Damon for co-writing and starring in Good Will Hunting (1997). He later directed and starred in Argo (2012), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. His other notable acting roles include Armageddon (1998) and Gone Girl (2014).
In 2023, Affleck directed, produced and played Nike co-founder Phil Knight in the biographical sports drama Air.
