Live By Night-Review

Let me get this out of the way and say that Ben Affleck as a filmmaker proves that he’s one of the many individuals who can wear a lot of hats in Hollywood. However it’s still a surprise that Ben Affleck the filmmaker can’t seem to stop casting Ben Affleck the actor as the unhappy, brooding individual. The same individual who organizes great set pieces and puts it together but never being a dominating force in the production. The same can be said about Live By Night.

The first act sees a young Joe, the son of a respected Boston police captain (Brendan Gleeson), cheating off card games of Irish mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister) while secretly having an affair with White’s girlfriend Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). While growing up much later, Coughlin comes to terms with his freewheeling antics now in a position of the criminal world that’s racially defined. It’s this kind of unholy aura that would you expect with a character to charm and intimidate his enemies but as a character, Ben Affleck struggles.

“Live by Night in today’s’ context is an important film to watch to understand the sentiments of present day America.”

Live By Night is heavily politicized. We see Joe burning bridges with the mob, get involved with the mafia and tangle with the heavily embedded Ku Klux Klan whilst getting support from cuban and african american immigrants. In today’s context, it’s an important film to watch to understand the sentiments of present day America. Live By Night as a whole is a great watch if you can overlook a few things. Zoe Saldana for example is given a sacrificial role as a Cuban rum lord whom Joe partners with and eventually marries and we see her transition to a mere love interest. It’s things like this that I feel are missed opportunities but given that Affleck wrote the screenplay and directed it straight from the book, it was expected. Chris Messina, on the other hand as Joe’s right-hand man Dion, brings much dark humor and contemplation to the film that I expected to see from Affleck. Elle Fanning as Loretta Figgis, the Tampa sheriff’s daughter who falls into a life of prostitution, is reformed, and then begins to speak out against the legalization of gambling—a key prong in Joe’s takeover of Florida brought much a sense of conflict to the story one that questioned Coughlin’s morality but the film ultimately snuffs that out too.

No question about it, Live By Night is a good watch to understand the time where American politics enforced a sense of morality as law and those that didn’t follow it profited. It’s a shame though for a great director like Affleck, Live By Night is only betrayed by Affleck the actor. It’s a novel crime saga that has the ambitions of Scarface but just doesn’t seem as memorable until you reach the final act of a chaotic shootout that’s so brilliantly shot and staged that you’re left wondering why this didn’t happen sooner. It makes me wonder what kind of magic that Ben Affleck will put out if he chose to remain behind the camera.

Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, a petty criminal in Prohibition-era ( No public consumption of alcohol) Boston who starts doing petty crime. Joe as a character is conniving, intelligent and ultimately, perceptive of power that sees him step out of the small pond by pitting the Italian and Irish mobs off of each other. Adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel of the same namesake, the film has a fun time seeing the web of alliances that Joe builds and spins but my biggest gripe with all of this is that Joe Couglin as a character comes of as, just plain boring.

It’s understandable that, coming off a huge Oscar win that capped his comeback and his return to the Hollywood A-list, Affleck would tackle a project of such scope. But along with his own disaffected acting, it’s that scope that betrays him. Live by Night is illustrating a crime saga with the ambition of The Godfather, but it’s trying to do it so quickly that it ends up simply going through the motions of the genre. One of the film’s final set pieces, a chaotic shootout between warring mobs in an opulent Tampa hotel, is so wonderfully staged, its action crisp and easy to follow, that it reminds you what skill Affleck has with the camera. Next time, he should perhaps confine himself behind it.