Nothing new in Affleck’s humdrum gangster film
If clothes made the film, Ben Affleck’s pedestrian film version of the 2012 Dennis Lehane crime novel “Live by Night” would, in gangster terms, qualify as a made movie.
Credit where it’s due: Costume designer Jacqueline West delivers the lapels, fedoras and sleek 1920s and early ’30s skirts in serious style, while production designer Jess Gonchor matches her work with lavishly detailed interiors and exteriors. The Lehane story, about a noble, good-guy Boston gangster in love and war and bootlegging, spins variations on the usual Tommygunning melees and cheap manipulations to keep the protagonist, a dull man portrayed dully by Affleck, in our good graces.
Director Affleck’s fourth feature, following “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and the best picture Oscar winner “Argo,” is a stubborn mixture of cheap thrills and pretension. Lehane can write, and Affleck’s in love with Lehane’s florid period argot. But the script feels lumpy and overreliant on voice-over (provided by Affleck). And it’s pretty shallow in its depiction of the sympathetic killer’s ups and downs. Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the resented son of a corrupt Boston police official (Brendan Gleeson, which helps). First, Joe falls for the pasty gangland moll played by Sienna Miller; then, in Florida, years later, he falls for the Cuban played by Saldana. Miller’s character says it: “We’re not fairy tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can’t grow under our feet. That’s our creed.” That line is indicative not of “real life” MPAA rating: Running time: but a different, more violent sort of fairy tale. As adapted by Affleck, it’s more sedating than seductive.
Historically speaking, there’s less money to be made in the movies with ambiguous or fatalistic morality tales than with morally uncomplicated slaughter. “Live by Night” wants it both ways. A World War I veteran, Joe survives a run-in with the worst Irish kingpin in Boston (Robert Glenister) and later becomes a trusted colleague of the Italians (Remo Girone plays the capo). From there, “Live by Night” heads to Florida, as Joe becomes the Italians’ frontman down where the sun shines and corruption only seems friendlier.
My favorite performance is Chris Messina’s; he plays Joe’s old pal and new bootlegging partner, and the genial-slob zest he brings to this cigarchomping killer qualifies him as a graduate, with honors, of the Paul Giamatti School of Zesty Genial Slobs Appearing in a Depression-Era Movie. In subplot B, more good acting to little avail: Chris Cooper is the Tampa police chief who looks the other way, while Elle Fanning plays his aspiring actress and rousing evangelist daughter, an obstacle for Joe’s business expansion plans.
The damper here is Affleck. As written and acted, Joe is a blank, a jaw held up by a suit. Sentimental and violent, the usual gangster movie combo, “Live by Night” may look first-rate (though Affleck’s direction, whether it’s action or simply two people seething, is routine), but it feels secondhand. Not second-rate, exactly, but previously owned by other storytellers, other filmmakers. If it sounds like I’m giving Affleck “the high hat and the icy mitt,” as one character puts it early on, well, there it is.