The Changing Value of Casey Affleck

From wimpy sidekick to conflicted leading man

Casey Affleck’s progression towards movie star status has come full circle in recent months. Leading roles in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone have brought him further into a limelight all his own, no longer stuck sharing the spotlight with his spotlight-hogging superstar brother Ben Affleck. The one is a made to measure Hollywood leading man, the other his shy, uncertain, less transparent sibling. The recent release of Gone Baby Gone, Ben’s directorial debut and arguably Casey’s starring-role debut, has, by some accounts, brought Casey closer to an even standing with his brother in the Hollywood pecking order.

But Casey’s evolution into a star, like any evolution, bares the traces of its origins – which all lead back to Ben. Our first encounters with him came from bit parts in his older brother’s stardom-sparking films (Chasing Amy, Good Will Hunting). His type-casting as the pathetic but endearing weakling shaped his early screen persona into something like the Squeaky Voiced Teen character on The Simpsons. The next few roles for Casey confirmed this, with roles in the American Pie and Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13 series making him the meek punching bag for the jokes and fraternal abuses of older, bigger and stronger cohorts. Even Casey’s turn as Fortinbras in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet couldn’t free him from the weak underling mold. And then came Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, in which Casey plays the weaker member of a duo alongside Matt Damon. For Casey’s part, Gerry could be an existential meditation on his potential as an emerging leading man alongside the older, already established, and more traditional movie star (with Matt Damon standing-in for his Good Will Hunting co-writer Ben). His brother’s shadow over Casey is also explicitly presnet in the Ocean series: the guy who plays his macho brother (Scott Caan) is taller, broader, and handsomer; basically the closest Steven Soderbergh could get to casting Ben Affleck without blowing the rest of his budget on another A-list Hollywood star.

But just as this shell started to envelope Casey, he started chipping away at it from the inside out. In the flawed yet side-splitting ensemble comedy Drowning Mona, Casey wears his usual stripes, playing the too-nice-for-his-own-good Bobby Calzone. But in one scene, an editorialized retelling of a confrontation between Bobby and the deceased madwoman Mona Dearly (Bette Midler), we get a glimpse of the Casey Affleck that we’ve started seeing this fall. As Casey explosively threatens Mona, “I’ll rip out your ovaries!” we laugh at how absurd this is coming from the scrawny push-over, but there’s also a moment of shock at how aggressive and slimy Casey could be.

And if this other Casey Affleck was conceived in a momentary fling during Drowning Mona, his birth was The Assassination of Jesse James. Again, Casey is cast alongside a Ben stand-in, another epitome of movie superstardom, Brad Pitt. This time, however, Casey is undoubtedly the film’s focus. And if his character’s fame within the movie is contingent on the older character’s notoriety, Casey’s performance is most impressive because it’s so much better than Pitt’s. Billed as a meditation on contemporary celebrity culture, The Assassination of Jesse James could also be construed as Casey’s search for his own place within contemporary movie culture. After killing Pitt’s Jesse James, Casey’s Robert Ford comes into his own; as if to become a leading man on his own terms Casey had to kill off the ruling movie star archetype embodied by Pitt. In the film’s outstanding epilogue, Ford re-enacts his killing of James hundreds of times to sold-out theatres. This meta-ending allows Casey, and his character Ford, to come into the last stage of their parallel developments. After the shy, mumbling sidekick roles we’ve gotten used to, a confident, swaggering, tortured and reckless actor emerges.

This same conflicted Casey inhabits the role of Patrick Kenzie in Ben’s Gone Baby Gone. Assailed by desperation on all sides, Casey’s embattled private investigator is left with no choice but to leap into the fray of violence that defines his environment. In doing so, Casey brings a sensitivity and vulnerability to the familiar urban investigator type, his calling card as the first in a new mold of leading man.

This article can also be found on the New York Press website here.