Live by Night (2016)

Live by Night (2016)

Movie rating 8.5/10

Director: Ben Affleck

Writers: Dennis Lehane (based on the novel by), Ben Affleck (screenplay)

Stars: Ben Affleck, Scott Eastwood, Zoe Saldana

R | 2h 8min | Crime, Drama

 Story line

Boston, 1926. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one-neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover-can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. Joe embarks on a dizzying.

Read imdb review  Here

He Pledges Allegiance Only to His Tommy Gun, in ‘Live by Night’

In “Live by Night,” Ben Affleck plays one of those romanticized antiheroes that movie stars love to suit up for, sometimes with a fedora. Over the decades these types have changed their looks and histories, but there’s a sameness to how they escape the law and the routine hum of everyday life; how they use guns ruthlessly or reluctantly; skip out on church yet live by their own moral code; and inevitably rise to become masters of their worlds, as well as of the most beautiful women in the room. They’re fantasies of power partly because no matter how hard this type falls, his power never truly corrupts.

That’s more or less what Mr. Affleck is hawking in “Live by Night,” a gangster movie set in the 1920s. He plays Joe Coughlin, a World War I veteran who’s returned from the war with a mouth full of tough-guy talk that basically boils down to, “I went away a soldier, I came home an outlaw.” Mr. Affleck recites this line with a gravelly hush, as if he were spilling a secret, but whatever Joe has learned in the bloody fields of Europe remains mostly obscured; what speaks loudly is his proficiency with a gun and the easy way in which he shoots at a man in a uniform, even if that man wears a badge.

“Live by Night” is a messy, unfocused movie about ambition, lost ideals, corrupt men and a thief whose idea of life on his own terms means pulling the trigger. It has Tommy guns and Model T’s, luxuriously polished surfaces, some fine squealing-tire action and a handful of solid performances, including one from Sienna Miller, who tramps around as a 10-cents-a-dance cynic. But what’s most striking about the movie is its earnestness. Mr. Affleck isn’t playing with genre for kicks or as a knowing, reflexive exercise, but trying to pour new wine into a bullet-riddled vessel.

This is harder to pull off than it looks, especially if — as Mr. Affleck does here — you’re trying to say something important about homegrown myths involving progress and exceptionalism. One hurdle is that our gangster movies are almost by definition about the dark side of the American dream, one that sexes up the Horatio Alger fairy tale with sin and violence only to then sometimes toss Horatio and his dream in the gutter. James Cagney machine-gunned his way to that dream in “The Public Enemy” in 1931. Decades later, an aggrieved father opened “The Godfather” with his own singular pledge of allegiance: “I believe in America.”

Based on a Dennis Lehane novel that shares the same title, “Live by Night” tracks Joe from his early Boston crime sprees and Oedipal issues to his escalating involvement in a crime syndicate. (Brendan Gleeson pops up early on as Joe’s policeman father.) Joe eventually lands in Tampa, Fla., where he builds a Prohibition empire, tangles with the sheriff (Chris Cooper) and falls in love with a local attraction (Zoe Saldana) who changes his ideas about life. There are complications, involving the sheriff’s daughter (Elle Fanning), other gangsters and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which are crammed amid intrigues, locations, cinematic homages and too many self-flattering scenes for Mr. Affleck.

Mr. Affleck handles the busy narrative without finding its hook, but his biggest problem is that he’s fallen for his leading man. He gave himself a good role in “Argo,” one of the earlier movies he directed (in the first, “Gone Baby Gone,” he stayed off camera). But in “Argo,” he was also embedded in that movie’s enjoyably loony complications and upstaged by a couple of world-class scene-stealers in Alan Arkin and John Goodman. In “Live by Night,” by contrast, Mr. Affleck grabs the center and doesn’t let go, partly, it seems, because he’s invested in being a movie star. (Certainly that’s the only rational explanation for “Batman v Superman,” other than the paycheck.)

Joe’s rise becomes progressively lucrative, uglier and more brutal, but Mr. Affleck has never been an actor who can persuasively go for the jugular and he can’t help but smooth the rough edges. This softening undercuts some of Mr. Affleck’s big moments, as when Joe faces down a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, a scene that ends up feeling more about affirming Joe’s superiority than advancing the story. At that moment and elsewhere, Joe scarcely seems the complex, conflicted man who lives by night even as he’s increasingly drawn into the day. He comes off like a different fantasy, one that’s a shotgun wedding between 20th-century pulp clichés and 21st-century elevated political consciousness.

Such moments weigh down “Live by Night,” making its heaviness ponderous. At the same time, there’s something appealing in how Mr. Affleck comes at the gangster genre and how this story departs from the tribal affiliations of films like “The Departed” toward a more pluralistic vision in tune with both today’s and yesterday’s United States. In “Live by Night,” Joe ends up thriving in a mixed neighborhood and rubbing elbows with people of different hues, yet this is scarcely an advertisement for so-called political correctness. If anything, he’s just another regular Joe, robbing, killing and swaggering his way to the American dream one bullet at a time.

Read full review at New york times

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In his outings as writer-director, Ben Affleck has shown an aptitude for tense, gritty material, arguably even more so in the vividly inhabited working-class Boston crime milieu of Gone Baby Gone and The Town than in his Oscar winner, Argo. So part of the disappointment of his engrossing but unexceptional fourth feature, Live by Night, is the departure from Beantown early on, when the action shifts to Prohibition-era Florida. But the more nagging hole in the thriller is Affleck himself, playing a tough guy with a sense of right and wrong, in a stolid performance that takes up a lot of space without packing the necessary gravitas.

Originally optioned by Warner Bros. as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio, who remains on board as a producer, this is Affleck's second screen adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, following Gone Baby Gone. But unlike that contemporary drama, the 1920s setting here only serves to point up how much more suited this kind of sprawling, granular crime narrative now seems to longform television, post-Boardwalk Empire. The movie is watchable enough but no nail-biter, particularly once two of the most compelling characters, played by Brendan Gleeson and Sienna Miller, are sidelined.

Following a limited Dec. 25 opening, the release goes wide Jan. 13, when it will likely fall prey to post-holiday doldrums. Adult male audiences with an appetite for old-school gangster action might be intrigued, but anyone hoping this would join the ranks of distinctive Prohibition thrillers like The Untouchables, Miller's Crossing or Once Upon a Time in America will find it lacks the teeth of those films, even though it doesn't stint on bloodshed. However, given the emboldened resurgence of white supremacist movements and the rise in hate crimes in the wake of Donald Trump's election, the movie might draw attention with an unexpectedly timely plot thread in which Affleck's character, Joe Coughlin, stands up to KKK intimidation.

Disillusioned by his experiences as a soldier in World War I, Coughlin returns to Boston an outlaw, vowing never to bow to authority again. After 10 years running a robbery operation, he's approached by Irish gangster Albert White (Robert Glenister) to help out in the Mob war against the Italians, headed by Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone). Joe declines, but gets pulled into organized crime via his clandestine relationship with White's mistress, Emma Gould (Miller). Knowing trouble when he sees it, Joe's father, Police Deputy Superintendent Thomas Coughlin (Gleeson), tries to steer his son away from the sassy Irish tart. But a botched bank-heist getaway and a double-cross land Joe in prison, believing that Emma has been iced.

Miller, outfitted in fabulous flapper chic by costumer Jacqueline West, makes a lively impression as a woman accustomed to using her sexual power to mask feelings of class inferiority, and the movie leaves you wanting a lot more of her. Likewise Gleeson, who hits commanding notes as an honest lawman repelled by his son's chosen life and yet bound by a father's love. "What you put out into the world will always come back to you, but never how you predict," he tells Joe, in words destined to haunt him.

Released from prison, Joe is determined to settle the score with White, who has moved to Miami to manage Florida's rum-running syndicate. Going against his oath never to work for a boss again, Joe signs on with Pescatore to wrestle for control of the Florida racket. Enlisting his loyal henchman Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), he relocates to Tampa, where he gains the strategic trust of the Cubans in Ybor City. He falls in love with black Cuban immigrant Graciela Suarez (Zoe Saldana), which makes him a target of sneering Klansman R.D. Pruitt (Matthew Maher), the brother-in-law of local sheriff Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper).

In the movie's most rushed section, Joe uses knowledge of Figgis' daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning), who went to Hollywood to pursue movie stardom, as leverage to get to R.D. She returns to town as an evangelical preacher who escaped damnation, dressing like a bride of Christ and whipping up a fuss in hellfire tent sermons against the demon rum and the ruin of gambling. That makes local authorities nervous about Joe's plan to set up Pescatore in the nascent casino business.

While Cooper has some strong moments as a fiercely conflicted man, in some ways mirroring Thomas Coughlin, Fanning is given too little screen time to make her character's transformation feel more than perfunctory, robbing a key scene of impact during which Loretta opens up to Joe. Graciela also loses some depth compared to the novel, with her revolutionary political zeal reduced to founding a sanctuary for abandoned Cuban women and children. Saldana plays her with a sad-eyed sultriness and a slinky wardrobe to match, but the role is purely decorative. Messina's cheeky swagger makes Dion a more diverting character.

The slack plotting builds with more inevitability than momentum toward a clash in which Joe and Dion are caught between White and Pescatore, the latter now flanked by his dimwit son Digger (Max Casella). But while Affleck aims for the Coppola tradition of operatic bloodbaths, the execution falls short, unfolding with the same rote efficiency as an earlier Boston cops-and-robbers chase or Joe's series of retaliatory strikes against the KKK. Flavorless characterizations from Glenister and Girone as the rival Mob kingpins don't help.

Affleck is not at his best here, looking uncomfortable in the boxy period suits, and coming off as somewhat lifeless for a man who sees himself as an outlaw, playing by his own rules and accountable only to his own codes of honor and compassion. Joe's righteous indignation in the face of institutionalized Southern bigotry gives the film some currency, but somehow, the central character remains remote and short on persuasive passion. This undercuts the pathos of the anticlimactic final act as well as the moral complexity of Lehane's writing, cramping the epic scope of the novel, the middle book in a Coughlin trilogy.

On the plus side, the movie looks sleek, with evocative period production design by Jess Gonchor and elegant framing from cinematographer Robert Richardson, painting in a subdued monochromatic palette that heats up once the action travels south. Live by Night is solid enough entertainment, but it lacks the nasty edge or narrative muscularity to make it memorable.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

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