In The Accountant, Ben Affleck Plays a Combination of Good Will Hunting and Jason Bourne With an Autistic Twist
Affleck's finest role combines two of his hated rival Matt Damon's signature characters!
The 2016 thriller The Accountant has a lot of problems. But it can never be accused of not making it one hundred percent clear that its protagonist has the most Autistic case of Autism in the history of the condition. It’s one of those movies that depicts Autistic people as being different in a way that makes them not super-human.
In The Accountant, Autism is a superpower. Its anti-hero can’t make eye contact or engage in small talk, but he can kill an entire room full of super-assassins with just a pencil while doing complicated mathematical formulas and curing cancer.
He’s an impressive human being, is what I am saying. It's almost TOO impressive. No, wait, I mean, he’s DEFINITELY too impressive, to the point where he doesn’t seem to be a human being at all but rather a warrior angel who is also really good at crunching numbers.
Though he did choose to appear in Gigli, Daredevil, and the “Jenny from the Block” video, Ben Affleck is not a stupid man. Nor does he lack talent or discernment. Yet he looked at this ridiculous screenplay and decided to devote months of his precious time and energy to making it a reality.
Why? I suspect that it’s because the role of Christian Wolff, super-genius/super-soldier/superhero/super-autistic man-God, combines characteristics from Good Will Hunting and Jason Bourne, the signature characters of Affleck’s hated rival Matt Damon.
They say that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Affleck HATES Damon. Who doesn’t? The man is objectively the worst. I doubt he drops by a Dunkin’ Donuts even once a year. So Affleck makes sure that sick fuck isn’t up to something by working with him extensively for decades.
In the role no one will remember him for, Affleck plays the grown-up version of a sensitive Autistic boy whose mother wanted her son to live in a treatment center for children with Autism. His soldier father, on the other hand, thinks that life will be difficult for his son, so he needs to toughen up by becoming a James Bond-level super-soldier.
So the domineering daddy trains him worldwide in the three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Ripping Dudes Throats Out. The young man becomes the greatest killer the world has ever known, but he’s also the greatest mathematical and business mind in history. And all because he’s Autistic. Not bad, eh? Movies love savants. They have much less use for people who are Autistic in more complicated and less glamorous and dramatic ways. All I ever got out of Autism, for example, is intense social awkwardness and the ability to hyper-focus on niche subjects that nobody cares about.
Christopher uses his freakishly advanced psyche to help the bad guys cook the books. Then, like an Autistic Robin Hood, he uses his ill-gotten loot to fund charitable endeavors, stock his sleek airstream trailer with priceless artwork, mint Mickey Mantle rookie cards, and other ostentatious displays of wealth.
Everything in The Accountant is needlessly complicated and convoluted. For example, J.K Simmons stars as Ray King, a Treasury officer on the brink of retirement who wants to track down Affleck’s mysterious do-gooder before his last day. Ray wants a young treasury agent named Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to assist him. Rather than just ask her, he instead lets her and us know that she lied to the government about certain elements of her traumatic childhood, and he will let the authorities know about her deception if she doesn’t play ball. This adds nothing to the film beyond making it even more pointlessly overwhelmed with subplots and characters begging for the cutting room floor.
Jon Bernthal stars as a vicious killer whose relationship with the hero is supposed to be mysterious when I guessed he was the hyper-competitive brother who figures prominently in flashbacks within his first few seconds onscreen. Bernthal isn’t bad. He never is. But he does not have a character to play. He has no agency or inner life. He just exists to oppose THE ACCOUNTANT and move the plot forward.
Actors who play Autistic characters, or Autistic-coded characters, often fall into two camps: they’re either robotic in their depiction of Autistic folk as unemotional and flat, or they deliver hammy performances full of tics and mannerisms.
Affleck falls into the robotic camp. He plays the impossible, improbable hero as someone who can do anything other than behave neurotypical. The problem with the character and the performance is that Autism isn’t an element of THE ACCOUNTANT; it’s the entirety of Christopher Wolff. Everything that he does or says or thinks is determined by his Autism.
This extends to his relationship with an assistant, played by Anna Kendrick, who learns to appreciate her unusual boss when he saves her from being killed by the bad guys. THE ACCOUNTANT’s emotional arc entails going from treating the beautiful woman in a dispassionate, wholly professional fashion to treating her with affection.
I’ve been intrigued by The Accountant because its Wikipedia entry makes it seem bizarre and potentially offensive. On paper, the surprise hit seems like loads of unintentional laughs, particularly since the filmmakers take the pulpy premise so seriously.
The Accountant perplexingly is oddly devoid of unwanted chuckles but also devoid of intentional humor. It plays a preposterous plot perversely straight in a way that keeps the movie from being dumb fun but also doesn’t result in it working on a non-ironic level, either.
The Accountant did quite well. It made over one hundred and fifty million dollars on a modest budget. There was talk of a sequel, but I’m not sure there’s any life left in this unique portrayal of Autism as akin to being a meta-human with Mossad/NAVY Seal-level fighting skills.
The Accountant embodies, in an unusually pure form, the many cliches and conventions that make entertainment about Autism so consistently frustrating and angry-making.
So, the opening day of this movie lined up with a 2016 tax season deadline (October 15). I was working at a tax accounting firm then, and the bosses thought a good reward for our office efforts was to come to a late afternoon screening of this silly film in the Kips Bay multiplex.
We had fun being basically a private audience of this silly film, mocking the accounting work Wolff ostensibly does. several people in the firm used dry-erase markers on the glass windows the next week.
It also has a reputation as being Affleck's Austistic Batman prequel to the DCEU nonsense.
I kinda wanna see how silly the sequel is.
The most baffling thing about The Accountant isn’t that Ben Affleck chose to make it, it’s that it was a hot-enough script to attract Mel Gibson & the Coen Brothers. I can only hope this was originally conceived as a parody.
It’s been noted that Ben Affleck’s pretty much an ideal Cyclops (in fact, one of the original choices to play him) – I suspect Affleck knows this too, which is why this has inexplicably gotten a sequel.