JANUARY 18, 2017
There are some movie gangsters who get into the underworld for revenge. Others do it so that they can make some quick easy money. Still others become gangsters because they just want to kill people.
In “Live By Night,” Ben Affleck’s mobster Joe Coughlin seems to be in it for the wardrobe.
Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, “Live By Night” is one of those familiar gangster tropes that follows the rise of a schlub from the streets to the top of the underworld. Here it’s Joe Coughlin, a World War I vet who vows never to take orders from anyone again. The son of a high-ranking Irish police captain (Brendan Gleeson, in a performance he could do in his sleep), Joe is determined to go his own way and become an “outlaw” (and pointedly not a gangster).
Joe’s success in low-level heists comes to the attention of Albert White (Robert Glenister), head of the Irish mob in Boston and Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone), boss of the local Italian Mafia. (Oh yes, it’s Boston, so Affleck is able to trot out his famous Beantown accent, a world in which the police are called “cawps.” You know the one.)
After a near-fatal affair with White’s mistress (Sienna Miller) and a botched bank robbery, Joe is captured and sentenced to prison. Once released, Joe, anxious to get back at White, offers his services to the Pescatore family, and he is sent to Florida to oversee the mob’s rum-running operation. Once Joe arrives and dons the white linen suit, he has truly become the one thing that he swore he would never be — a gangster.
The Boston section is a pretty familiar gangster yarn that’s jam-packed with action, though not particularly told in any kind of fresh way. But it’s when the action moves to Florida that “Live By Night” really goes off the rails. It’s not that the story is bad, but there’s way too much of it to tell in the short amount of time that Affleck has left, so everything is rushed through to get all of it in — it’s a 400-page novel, after all. There’s just simply no time for the these many many characters to breathe. (This may be one of those projects that might have been more effective had it been a 3-part HBO mini-series rather than a feature film.)
And those characters that populate the Florida story! Let’s start with the trigger-happy KKK leader (Matthew Maher) with a cleft lip who just happens to be…the son-in-law of the local corrupt police chief (Chris Cooper) who suffers a nervous breakdown and begins shooting up the place because of his…daughter (Elle Fanning) who, in Hollywood to become a star, is turned into a sex slave and heroin addict but once rescued, returns to town as a powerful evangelist who displays her track marks as if they were stigmatas. Whew! And that’s just one family tree! Ah, the South! And I could go on (but I won’t).
Surprisingly, the best performance in the film is turned in by sitcom star Chris Messina (FOX’s “The Mindy Project”) who is dramatically cast-against type as cigar-smoking gun-toting henchman Dion Bartolo, who is the only person in this enterprise who seems to be having any fun. Messina has a tricky line to walk by being both the life of the party and expert with a tommy-gun, and he pulls both off believably.
In fact, Affleck’s only major casting mistake is his leading man. To be blunt, Ben Affleck is really too soft to play this part — “Live By Night” would have likely been much more effective without him in front of the camera. (Imagine how much better the film would be if he cast an actor like Tom Hardy in the role.) Granted, it may be easier for a tough guy to play nice than a soft actor to play hard, but his co-star Messina managed to knock it out of the park doing just that. Even when Joe is supposed to be dynamic, here Affleck at times plays dynamism listlessly and that helps to drain audience interest over the course of two hours.
Though Affleck won an Oscar for co-writing “Good Will Hunting” nearly 20 years ago, this is the first produced script that he has written solo, and unfortunately he has not cracked the “too much story” problem with the structure of the film. Fortunately, he still has his considerable directorial chops, and, despite the sometimes ragged pacing of the Florida story, he’s got a dilly of a car chase in the Boston story that really works and will tickle any fan of old-time automobiles performing like modern sports-cars.
After his first three stabs at directing (“Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and 2012 Best Picture “Argo”) really worked, that string has now ended with “Live By Night.” It has its moments, but it’s largely a swing and a miss. Affleck will no doubt be back, but next time he’d should take the time to cast a better leading man.
GRADE: C+
