I Am a #$!@*% Millionaire: Ben Affleck in the Year 2000

 by Rob DiCristino

The year my boy became a movie star.

Bounce (Dir. Don Roos)

The second of two films Ben Affleck did with then-paramour Gwyneth Paltrow (the other being 1998’s Shakespeare in Love), Don Roos’ Bounce introduces a charming and arrogant young advertising executive named Buddy — a stretch for Affleck, I know, but remember that movies are all about suspension of disbelief — who inadvertently avoids a deadly plane crash when he gives his ticket to a beleaguered father (Tony Goldwyn as Greg) trying to get home to his family. Wracked with guilt over his role in Greg’s death, Buddy tracks down his widow (Paltrow as Abby) and together they do the rom-com thing in the typical fashion: Will Buddy cop to his role in Greg’s death? Are Abby and her children ready for a serious relationship? Will Affleck ever be half as talented an actor as Paltrow? Despite middling reviews from critics — although Bounce is an example of Patrick’s “a 2-star movie in 2000 is a 5-star banger now” thesis — the film pulled in a respectable $53MM and, according to firsthand reports from Adam, did well enough at Blockbuster to break about even.

Even with Paltrow acting circles around him, Affleck and his crispy hair are good in Bounce, a romantic comedy with enough late-’90s savvy to feel like it’s lovingly embracing a stock genre formula instead of lazily appropriating one. There’s a nice equity of blame at play — Abby lies to Buddy, too, claiming at first that she and Greg are divorced — and it’s notable that Bounce is one of the first times on screen that Ben confronts the alcoholism that will soon come to define his public persona. There’s also some great 2000-era (era) stuff, with references to AOL discs, Lycos searches, and Abby being “between beeper numbers.” Roos’ screenplay might occasionally back itself into some tonally-mismatched corners that distract from the romance — survivor’s guilt, mortgage rates, outdated sexual politics, a civil trial that bankrupts an airline — but Bounce is a strong effort from a budding leading man who’s establishing an affinity for offbeat material, a handsome shithead whose heart — if not any of his other organs — is in more or less the right place.

Reindeer Games (Dir. John Frankenheimer)

We’ve already covered John Frankenheimer’s Christmas actioner Reindeer Games a fair bit at FTM — see Reserved Seating and 2K Replay for a deeper dive — so let’s just consider the Affleck of it all: Watching Reindeer Games back-to-back with Bounce, it’s easy to see why the year 2000 was a dream for the actor’s agent: These roles solidified his four-quadrant credentials — or five, if we allow a “finance bros who love Boiler Room” quadrant — and made him the poster boy for the glossy, dial-up aesthetic that defined the early part of the new millennium. Affleck doesn’t have anywhere near the gravitas of previous Frankenheimer leads like Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman, or Roy Scheider, but then, neither did that period of pop culture. This wasn’t an age of gritty antiheroes who embodied malaise and cynicism. No, despite Frankenheimer's attempt to give it a ‘70s edge, Reindeer Games is all pre-9/11 mall-core, the product of a time when gaudy, brainless programmers were prevalent enough that a competent one like this could be a certified box-office bomb.

For his part, Affleck acquits himself well enough. It’s clear how game he is to be playing an ex-con in a John Frankenheimer joint, how much he relishes the opportunity to share the screen with real actors like Gary Sinise and — while her talents wouldn’t be recognized for a few more years — Charlize Theron. You could certainly argue that Affleck is too green to be playing a hardened car thief at this point in his career, but the aloofness that hobbles him in the early going actually becomes a kind of hapless cunning that benefits the film as it goes on. Frankenheimer’s wide-angle close-ups give the whole affair a paranoia that Affleck eventually embodies with a fair bit of confidence. Again, Sinise and Theron are the real draws of Reindeer Games — Theron plays a double-crossing gun moll straight out of a gangster classic — but it also demonstrates how Affleck learned to carry an ensemble thriller, which would pay off in his career-best performance in David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

Boiler Room (Dir. Ben Younger)

Look, there’s no way I’m rewatching Boiler Room, so let’s just talk about Affleck’s big speech. It’s his Glengarry Glen Ross moment, of course, and while he can’t quite fill out that three-button suit or get enough gravel into his voice to make the “Fuck You” moments feel as commanding as Alec Baldwin or Michael Douglas might have, it all fits Boiler Room’s essential twerpiness: He should feel a little weightless, a little full of shit. That scene should feel like a smarmy asshole flopping his dick on the table. He should be performatively confident enough that other greedy idiots like Giovanni Ribisi’s aspiring broker would be in awe of his Axe Body Spray charisma. 2000 was, after all, a transition phase in popular culture, a time when the Baldwins and Douglases of yesteryear would have felt outmoded to a generation reared in the wake of Gen X cynicism and staring down a bedazzled, Extremely Online future. Affleck’s shit-eating swagger was a feature, not a bug, which made him the ideal leading man for the new millennium.