The Accoun­tant

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing take­aways from David Fincher’s 2014 thriller Gone Girl was the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Ben Affleck’s often expres­sion­less face could nonethe­less be cap­ti­vat­ing. Two years lat­er, direc­tor Gavin O’Connor attempts to recap­ture the mag­ic by cast­ing him as a semi-autis­tic accoun­tant-cum-covert killing machine. This com­bi­na­tion sets up a min­i­mal­is­tic per­for­mance from Affleck, but also makes for a tire­some film that tries to have its cake and eat it too, leav­ing bare­ly a few crumbs for its audience.

We first meet Chris­t­ian Wolff (Affleck) as a child bat­tling with men­tal health issues and with his par­ents’ con­fu­sion towards them. His father, a mil­i­tary man, stereo­typ­i­cal­ly refus­es to see any­thing pos­i­tive in Christian’s dif­fer­ence, pre­fer­ring instead to pro­tect him by teach­ing him to fight back so that he may be left in peace. Flash for­ward some 25 years lat­er and Chris­t­ian is now lead­ing a nor­mal, unevent­ful life as the local accoun­tant in a small Amer­i­can town. And he seems sat­is­fied enough – he’s not inter­est­ed in small talk with his clients, he focus­es on doing their account­ing with extreme effi­cien­cy, before return­ing to his dai­ly rit­u­als, pre­sent­ed in all their minute details.

In a bid to avoid trad­ing in obvi­ous cliché, O’Connor opts to flesh out every pos­si­ble stereo­type usu­al­ly attrib­uted to both autis­tic behav­iour and accoun­tants. Being slight­ly obsessed, Chris­t­ian likes order, there­fore his food is placed care­ful­ly on his plate. And since he is a man of high-func­tion­ing intel­lect, he appre­ci­ates great art, own­ing a few paint­ings which he enjoys star­ing at reg­u­lar­ly while lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal music. Yet Christian’s muf­fled frus­tra­tion towards him­self and his dif­fi­cult child­hood means that he needs to blast out some met­al music while hurt­ing him­self regularly.

Watch­ing this suc­ces­sion of expand­ed exam­ples of char­ac­ter­is­tic habits, it’s hard not to think that, how­ev­er sim­plis­tic and demean­ing stereo­types can be, they exist as short­cuts to avoid such bor­ing scenes of expo­si­tion. Rather than mak­ing Chris­t­ian more human, O’Connor’s atten­tion to detail turns him into a bor­ing­ly com­plex character.

Being a genius, Chris­t­ian excels at his job, espe­cial­ly so when hired to look into the books of big cor­po­ra­tions try­ing to avoid scan­dals or to laun­der mon­ey. When Lamar Black­burn (John Lith­gow, giv­en very lit­tle to do) is alert­ed by his employ­ee Dana Cum­mings (Anna Kendrick, con­vinc­ing as a reg­u­lar accoun­tant and all-round polite per­son) that some mon­ey has been leak­ing from his com­pa­ny Liv­ing Robot­ics, he con­tacts Chris­t­ian. Overnight, Chris­t­ian uncooks 15 years worth of books and finds said leak in a rous­ing mon­tage of him cov­er­ing the walls of the room with num­bers and calculations.

As he enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly shares his find­ings with Dana the next day, the film almost man­ages to make account­ing seem excit­ing. When the dis­cov­ery leads to bru­tal mur­ders and the sud­den shut­down of Christian’s inves­ti­ga­tions, O’Connor even comes close to the deli­cious­ly dark ter­rain of 1970s con­spir­a­cy dra­mas à la All the President’s Men, where the only way to find the truth is to tedious­ly dig into paperwork.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in a ner­vous and schiz­o­phrenic attempt to tick all pos­si­ble box­es, O’Connor sud­den­ly los­es all con­fi­dence in the pos­si­bil­i­ty for maths and crim­i­nal schemes to be thrilling in them­selves and adds a hefty dose of action to the dra­ma. When he refus­es to let the case go, Chris­t­ian has to face count­less skilled and armed men, all the while hid­ing his iden­ti­ty from the Trea­sury Depart­ment led by Ray King (JK Sim­mons) with whom he has var­i­ous accounts to settle.

As flash­backs reveal, Christian’s father taught him a lot more than just to pro­tect his teeth in fights at school, and still with his stern face, Chris­t­ian punch­es, stabs and shoots every man who gets in his way. This vio­lence can be seen as the mark of anoth­er ​’70s influ­ence, recall­ing as it does the heart­less blood­i­ness of Dirty Har­ry. With its focus on fam­i­ly, the film even has a touch of the venge­ful mer­ci­less­ness of Death Wish about it. Sad­ly, O’Connor dis­tances him­self from those films by choos­ing the eas­i­er and nowa­days more com­mon­ly trav­elled path of casu­al hyper-vio­lence. After a while, see­ing Chris­t­ian shoot men point blank in the face with a loud gun becomes slight­ly less hor­rif­ic, but the body count’s exor­bi­tance remains at once shock­ing and irri­tat­ing­ly inconsequential.

Such lazy string-pulling rarely excites, and is in fact char­ac­ter­is­tic of the film’s nar­ra­tive: the final act reveals a suc­ces­sion of twists and con­nec­tions in extend­ed flash­backs and lengthy con­fes­sion scenes that feel like betray­als of the audience’s trust. Even then, The Accoun­tant still man­ages to leave many ques­tions unanswered.