THE INSTIGATORS: Requiem for the Boston Movie

As clusters of teens crowd into the subterranean bowels of the Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan to see Deadpool & Wolverine on a Thursday night, there’s something poignant about the decidedly over-thirty-ness of the sold-out crowd watching The Instigators. If you haven’t heard of The Instigators until now, you’re probably not alone. Directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow, the Road House remake), this Matt Damon/Casey Affleck vehicle is currently in a limited theatrical run before its release on Apple TV+ August 9th. This unceremonious debut is a far cry from the heady successes of the films that made both of its stars famous, from Good Will Hunting to The Departed–– and The Instigators evokes these Boston movies of yore like a Dunkin’ drinkin’ Ghost of Christmas Past. The film itself may be forgettable, but more than anything, its appeal lies here, as a self-aware paean to a genre that’s (sorry) Gone Baby Gone. 

The Boston Movie is Dead

In 2022, I wrote a piece investigating the slow decline of the Boston Movie, from its apotheosis in the ‘90s and 2000s when The Departed raked in hundreds of millions of dollars and Best Picture to two decades later, when Ben Affleck (king of the Boston movie) shot his little-seen, straight-to-streaming working-class drama The Tender Bar in Braintree and Lowell–– but set it on Long Island. The genre used to be so pervasive that Seth Meyers parodied it with a fake trailer my New England family still quotes regularly, skewering its tropes, from terrible Boston accents, (a fake blurb reads: “I kept wondering if the director ever stepped in and asked, where do you think your character is from?”) to endless references to random places in The Bay State, to parodic levels of violence; mostly, the trailer suggests, the Boston movie is about “loyalty and family and all that other Boston stuff.” 

In my essay, I argued that on top of these evergreen themes, the core tenants of the Boston movie are fundamentally class-based, their aesthetic pleasures centered around working-class toughs with tattoos and hearts of gold struggling to make good in a hardscrabble, crime-riddled town. But Boston isn’t that town anymore, and so the Boston movie as we know it packed up and moved further up and down the shore to places where you can still easily shoot with factories and triplexes in the background. That year, CODA won Best Picture, telling its wholesome, PG-13 story of family and loyalty on the fishing docks of Gloucester. 

Boston itself has started picking up a different image, having fully recovered from the rampant crime and corruption that exploded in the ‘70s and ‘80s (the subject of most Boston films from The Friends of Eddie Coyle [1973] to The Town [2010]) and gentrified rapidly in the mid-late 2010s. Boston’s crime rate reached a record low in 2023, and BME jobs have replaced hit jobs downtown. This change is on full display in hit films like Anyone But You (2023). Most of this movie may be set in Australia, but in its opening scenes, beautiful, young, diverse, and overtly wealthy tech/finance bros frolic in the kinds of Harvard Square college bars previously viewed with open disdain by Ben Affleck characters (“How do you like them apples?”).

It’s simply not possible to ignore the city’s changing demographic realities and recapture that good old-fashioned grit any longer–– unless you’re making a period piece like Black Mass (2015) or The Boston Strangler (2023), and even then you might not get the kind of Boston movie you’re expecting: For that latter film, director Matt Ruskin explicitly forbade his cast from doing any Boston accents at all because, “he claims he’s from Boston and he doesn’t have an accent,” according to co-star Carrie Coon. Nevermind that the film was set in 1964, before hardy regional dialects were softened by decreasing regional insularity (or that the director, who’s from Watertown, does indeed have the faintest whiff of a Boston accent). The same day The Instigators hit (a very small number of) theaters, the man who beat Whitey Bulger to death was officially sentenced to prison. The Boston movie is dead. 

Long Live the Boston Movie

So it was with genuine pleasure that my partner and I sat down with a bowl of queso and a beer to watch Michael Stuhlbarg absolutely butcher his lines in a smear of almost-dropped AAHs and squishy non-rhotic UUHs. Alongside Alfred Molina’s barely-hidden British t’s and crisp aaah’s (“I’m just a bay-kah,” he offers with a shrug), and Ving Rhames just using his normal voice, I was brought back to a childhood spent white-knuckling it through actors’ failed attempts at a Southie cadence. The whole movie is like this, a nostalgia trip for Boston and Boston movies past. 

The film was produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and co-written by Casey Affleck and Quincy-native Chuck MacLean (the creator of that Boston-movie TV holdout, City on a Hill, who started his career as a reporter for the Boston Herald), and the press-tour feels like an excuse for everyone to hang out and chew the fat about the old times. Underneath its breezily conventional script (full of neat twists and turns and generic character motivations), the movie itself is a meta-commentary on this very dynamic.  

The Instigators follows two down-on-their-luck middle-aged guys from Quincy, Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck). After some perfunctory setup (Rory is depressed and in debt, Cobby is an ex-con with a drinking problem) the pair meet as part of a shaggy dog team preparing to rob the Mayor’s victory party on election night. The only problem? Their criminal mastermind (Stuhlbarg) is stuck in the past. For the scheme to work, the city’s gruff, defiantly corrupt old-guard mayor Michael Miccelli (Ron Perlman) has to win the race. 

This character is an obvious stand-in for the infamously criminal bosses of the 20th century, best exemplified by James Michael Curley (the model for Spencer Tracy’s character in The Last Hurrah,) and, slightly more recently, Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, both of whom were convicted of crimes while in office. But, as my father (who’s from Taunton) put it when I called him to chat about this article, the mayor of Boston “hasn’t been a guy out of central casting like that in my lifetime.” When the fresh-faced anti-corruption candidate, Mark Choi (Ronnie Cho), wins the race, only the Goodfellas themselves seem surprised. The heist–– and the city government–– are thrown into chaos while throngs of triumphant young Democrats crowd outside city hall holding signs denouncing the creaky, outré establishment for bigotry and graft. While nobody was accusing the real-life previous mayor, Marty Walsh, of criminal conspiracy, Boston did elect its first non-white mayor, Taiwanese-American Michelle Wu, in 2021, for whom Choi is a clear analogue. 

With this plot point, the film reveals itself to be a surprise fish-out-of-water comedy that flips the script of the Boston movie, a sly, lowkey update that puts the criminals on the back foot: “When did everybody in this town become a hero?” Rory asks with dry dismay after yet another character calls the cops on them. What was once taboo has become the logical thing to do when a guy with a bullet wound shows up outside your door. Rory and Cobby’s petty antics are fundamentally out of place in this modern Boston, and the film takes great pleasure in reminding us of this time and again. A typical exchange as the two flee the city-wide manhunt they sparked reads like this: “You sure you can get this thing to work?” “I’m from Quincy, hotwiring cars was practically part of the curriculum!” 

The film treats its references to older Boston movies with the same relish and warm familiarity that Affleck and Damon clearly feel trading laid-back barbs (or that our forty-something audience felt listening to them). It’s practically a bloopers reel for the genre: Rory is obviously an inverted Will Hunting figure, and his unflappable therapist Donna Rivera (Hong Chau) is brought along for the ride, offering her services in the middle of car chases to the kinds of guys who say they feel “fine” during an explosion. (“You’re minimizing my feelings,” Cobby snarks.) The government corruption plot feels like a playful rearticulation of the themes of The Departed, while the heist takes the boys on a tour of Fenway Park, a la The Town. The half-baked gestures towards melancholy about aging, family, and failed patriarchal masculinity are pale shadows of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (alongside overt references, like their regular trips to New Hampshire and attempts to get to Canada). 

Where in the past, Affleck films like The Town wielded their references with freshness and zest and gravity, here, the gentle, comedic tone and obvious nostalgia these old friends feel about a Boston they know is gone forever somehow elevates this inoffensive, relatively bland streaming film into something a little more–– a wink-and-a-nod kind of swan song, the kind that’ll tell you to fuck off if you ask how it’s feeling. This is a kinder, gentler Boston movie: There’s plenty of Dunkin’ product placement, but no Dropkick Murphy’s (or sex). In a million ways, The Instigators is a fundamentally forgettable movie, the kind you would watch on Redbox (if Redbox hadn’t just gone under). And in some ways, that’s sort of the point (don’t Fever Pitch or Game 6 feel like Redbox movies? They may not be good, but on a rainy day, they’re perfect). 

Conclusion:

Boston movies don’t like to say goodbye. From Will Hunting’s cheeky final note to Doug (The Town’s protagonist) leaving Charlestown without a word, they’re full of guys who clearly love each other but, as Rory tells Dr. Rivera in his opening line, “can’t talk about it.” So we won’t say goodbye to the Boston movie. Instead, we’ll take a page out of The Friends of Eddie Coyle and simply say, with the faintest whiff of black humor in the face of unavoidable finality (or a set of knuckles caught in a drawer), “Have a nice day.”