MoviesReviewThe actor plays a man who uses his disorder to balance books for criminals in a film that struggles to balance derivative action and underwritten romance
“Sooner or later, difference scares people.” The Accountant puts that sentiment in the mouth of a military man (Robert C Treveiler) explaining the tough ways of the world to his autistic, bullied son. But it could as easily be said by the director Gavin O’Connor, who has put together a drama so familiar and formulaic that even the most timid viewer will be comforted. Or, more likely, anesthetized.
The Accountant is committed to a pretense of difference. Its protagonist, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), is autistic. As he explains, he has trouble understanding what other people are thinking, he can’t pick up on social cues, he gets deeply absorbed in tasks – especially mathematical tasks – and he panics when he is unable to finish them. As a child (played by Seth Lee), he rocks uncontrollably, throws violent tantrums, wears unsightly glasses, and checks a number of the Hollywood boxes for “geeky” and “different”.
As an adult, Chris is supposed to be geeky and odd as well. In fact, though, the film comfortably and predictably presents autism as a superpower, which turns a Clark Kent-like accountant into the usual super action hero. Chris’s lack of affect, leavened with an occasional corny quip, isn’t that different from the taciturn manliness of James Bond. His incredible math abilities fit neatly into standard manly hyper-competence. He’s even got a superhero origin story: to teach him to protect himself from bullies, his dad had him train with top combat specialists around the world. In one inevitable scene, we see young Chris training with a martial arts specialist in Jakarta, because superheroes always follow the Orientalist path east to learn their awesome special abilities. Affleck spends most of the film stoically not reacting. He might as well still be playing Batman.
The one variation from Hollywood action default is the relationship with accountant Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), which instead follows the Hollywood formula that disabled people don’t get to have happily-ever-after romances. Kendrick does her best with a relatively small role, bringing a modicum of wit and energy to the lugubrious script. Despite all the tropes working against them, she and Affleck have a subdued, sweet chemistry, which might have carried a romantic comedy version of The Accountant, if only the film-makers had been willing to give it a chance.
But instead we get an action movie plot which is drearily rote in its studied insistence on surprise. The narrative is intricately constructed, yet ersatz and shapeless, like a clock with Nerf gears. Christian uses his super math abilities to balance the books for criminal enterprises. He’s being pursued by the treasury department, led by Ray King (JK Simmons) and Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), and so decides to take on a legitimate client, a robotics company that has just discovered an irregularity in the books. That’s where he meets Dana, the company accountant who discovered the irregularity. And then both of them are targeted for death, leading to car chases, shoot-outs, fisticuffs and much choreographed violence. You know the drill.
An action movie doing its action movie thing would be fine – what else do you go to an action movie for? But The Accountant has that deadly action movie vice, pretensions to cleverness and emotional weight. Flashbacks, and then more flashbacks, and then still more flashbacks fill in an extensive and tedious backstory, which includes not only Chris’s childhood struggles with his autism, but gangland hits, prison time, parental death and on and on. Tragic backstories are parceled out to all, even the treasury agents, and the conclusion of the film devolves into a series of overdetermined twist revelations. This treasury agent has a surprising history with Chris, that villain has a surprising history with Chris, this autistic girl who helped Chris finish a puzzle when he was a child has a very important role. Chris’s brother appears in a denouement so on-the-nose I and the person sitting next to me both groaned aloud.
The film ends with a sincere declaration of the worth and value of the non-neurotypical. An empathetic therapist explains to a concerned couple: “Your son’s not less than. He’s different.” But how sympathetic to autistic people is the film really when, in order to be a hero, an autistic person has to be a super-competent fighting machine exactly the same as all the other super-competent fighting machines?
Geoff Todd, a writer whose child is autistic, wrote after seeing The Accountant’s trailer about Hollywood’s obsession, from Rain Man on, with autistic people who have amazing abilities. “My child was diagnosed with autism about six years ago, at least once a week we are asked what his special skill is,” Todd says. “Here we sit, in 2016, and yet another film is attempting to frame the diagnosis as one with the particular perk of advantage, a savant like quality.” The Accountant uses a cliched and misleading presentation of disability to produce a cliched Hollywood action lead in a cliched action plot, and then babbles cliches about the importance of embracing difference. Despite its protestations to the contrary, the only thing that sets The Accountant apart from its peers is its irritating, clueless hypocrisy, and its lousy title.
- The Accountant will be released in the US on 14 October and in the UK on 4 November
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