Live by Night
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Written by: Ben Affleck - Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
Starring: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Remo Girone, Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Miguel J. Pimentel, Max Casella, Anthony Michael Hall, Clark Gregg
Crime/Drama - 128 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Jan 2017
Written by: Ben Affleck - Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
Starring: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Remo Girone, Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Miguel J. Pimentel, Max Casella, Anthony Michael Hall, Clark Gregg
Crime/Drama - 128 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Jan 2017
Concerning the men who survived World War I’s battlefields, some lost their minds due to the trench warfare, A Very Long Engagement, some tried to keep changing the world, Lawrence of Arabia, and some, including Live by Night’s Joe Coughlin, climbed out of the senseless slaughter and developed a disdain for authority figures and rules. Now the fourth Dennis Lehane novel to be adapted into a movie and the second one directed by Ben Affleck, Live by Night is the fourth best entry behind Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island. Placing last on this last does not infer Live by Night is an awful film, far from it, but compared to its brothers, the drama is blunter, the intrigue lacks punch, and the setting shift from Boston to Tampa takes a certain edge off the atmosphere.
Working as a freelance criminal in a Prohibition city ruled by gangs, Joe Coughlin (Affleck, The Accountant) lacks the protection organized crime offers. His unlikely shield is his father (Brendan Gleeson, In the Heart of the Sea), the Deputy Superintendent of the Police Department. Dad lets Joe stick up poker games and rob banks as long as he doesn’t commit too many felonies in the process. This is because Joe has a certain integrity about lawbreaking. His threshhold for right and wrong is lower than most of us citizens, but it’s not as low as the cut-throat mobsters who slaughter each other over Boston’s moonshine market.
Working as a freelance criminal in a Prohibition city ruled by gangs, Joe Coughlin (Affleck, The Accountant) lacks the protection organized crime offers. His unlikely shield is his father (Brendan Gleeson, In the Heart of the Sea), the Deputy Superintendent of the Police Department. Dad lets Joe stick up poker games and rob banks as long as he doesn’t commit too many felonies in the process. This is because Joe has a certain integrity about lawbreaking. His threshhold for right and wrong is lower than most of us citizens, but it’s not as low as the cut-throat mobsters who slaughter each other over Boston’s moonshine market.
What kind of a gangster film would this be if Joe didn’t fall for the wrong dame? Sneaking behind the head of the Irish mob’s back with his favorite mistress (Sienna Miller, High-Rise), Joe plans one last job to fund a new life for himself and his sweetheart. Everything goes south and not only does Joe have to deal with city load of vengeful cops, but the big bad boss man finds out about Joe being in cahoots with his woman. Joe’s father, who appears incapable of small talk and only engages Joe in conversations fathers and sons do not have, like the definition of love and why he was born, saves the day with some prison time for Joe and an interlude for him to plot his future moves of vengeance.
Affleck films Boston as dark, wet, and cold; an apt portrayal as that is what Boston is for a number of winter months every year. Most of the exterior shots trying to show what Boston looked like in the late 1920s are shot in the North End, perhaps the last area of the city to convert to condos and renovate into mixed-use high end shopping and fancy apartments. Upon release from prison, Joe strikes a deal with the Italian mob, sets up shop in sun-drenched Ybor City, and starts to corner the rum market up and down the entire east coast.
The stark plot and mood shift to Tampa is abrupt. Unlike Boston, Tampa is saturated in color and Director of Photography Robert Richardson (The Hateful Eight) gives us a batch of pull-back, widescreen shots of Joe driving on solitary back roads and over bridges connecting the islands south of Tampa toward Sarasota. We can only guess at the true geography because Affleck didn’t actually film in Tampa; he went to Georgia. Apparently, contemporary coastal Georgia is the closest the southeast can relate to what Tampa looked like in the early 1930s.
However, if the location shots do not look quite right to you, check out the wardrobe Joe and his henchmen sport around town. In the heart of the Depression, costume designer Jacqueline West’s (Knight of Cups) suits could step down off the hangars themselves and walk around; these suits are their own character. Joe is also, by far, the most socially progressive hood in all of Florida. He falls in love with a Cuban woman (Zoe Saldana, Star Trek Beyond), works with Italians, is briefed on the different social levels between Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans, and engages in an all out war with the local KKK affiliate. Any film that refers to the KKK as “inbred shitpickers” is a friend of mine. Just about every man who Joe comes across without his white bedsheets on certainly appears to have a chromosomal problem.
There are also themes of the Deep South’s hypocritical reliance on the Almighty and a remarkable ability of property-owning, white gentry to know what God wants. Joe comes to an understanding and forms a large amount of respect for the local Chief of Police (Chris Cooper, August: Osage County) and his daughter, Loretta (Elle Fanning, The Boxtrolls). To keep the body count low, the Chief allows Joe to run loose in Ybor as long as he confines it to a strict set of boundaries. Joe’s compassionate feelings, of which he is well aware are leading him into trouble with the big bosses up north, trip up his dreams of transforming Ybor and central west Florida as a whole into something larger than a den of sin. Loretta leads tent revivals as a born again fallen angel and Joe cannot help but take pity on the wretch.
Shades of Wold War I's aftermath, the Boston gang wars, libertine flappers, racism and class strife in the Deep South, Cuban nationalism, and the thin line between the acceptable level of criminality and all out cruelty is a lot to shove into a two hour film, but even then there are portions of Live by Night that drag. There is the requisite amount of Dennis Lehane violence with pistols and tommy guns to satiate the adrenaline junkies and plenty of time devoted to Affleck and Saldana’s somewhat cold relationship for the romantics, but Affleck is missing the Lehane kick to tie it all together. Shutter Island had its big reveal and Mystic River had desperation and an unspoken conspiracy; Live by Night has about 6.5 different endings and a desire to be an epic that will only be taken as a somewhat respectable action/thriller.
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