Directed by: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Chris Messina, Chris Cooper, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Robert Glenister, Remo Girone
Live by Night never achieves liftoff. Director Ben Affleck wants us to really like his protagonist, which is fatal to a film about a violent mobster working his way up in the Boston mob. At times, Joe Coughlin (Affleck) is a gun-toting killer, at other times a softie romantic, and at other times moral and upstanding. Instead of a multi-dimensional character, Joe Coughlin feels more like a prisoner of the screenplay. If the movie doesn't know what to think of him, then how can we?
Live by Night has moments in which it starts to connect and the story appears to be moving forward, but these are islands unto themselves. The film has a cogent feel for its time and place and looks right, but at times feels like a saggy season four episode of Boardwalk Empire. The production values nor the actors can be blamed, just its directionless plot and main characters which stops and starts when it should soar.
Until this film, Affleck was batting three-for-three in the director's chair. Argo, 2012's Best Picture, was a gripping, taut, and suspenseful film based around the Iran Hostage Crisis. Live by Night is only occasionally gripping and suspenseful, and takes a lot longer to tell its story than is necessary. As Live by Night opens, we learn Joe is a World War I veteran who has seen plenty of war horrors and is determined not to take orders from anyone again. This delusion doesn't last long as he turns to a life of crime. He robs banks with help of trusted cohorts like Dion (Messina), but soon the Irish mob boss in town, Albert White (Glenister) wants his cut. Coughlin begins working for White despite having a police superintendent father (Gleeson), who naturally disapproves of his son's career choice and his affair with Emma (Miller), who is White's mistress as well. We know that won't end well, although it doesn't end as badly as you would think.
Joe is soon pinched for a botched robbery which left cops dead. He does a generous three-year prison stretch and upon release goes to work for White's Italian rival Masso Pescatore (Girone), who sends Joe to Florida to turn around the sinking illegal booze and narcotics trade there. With Emma now out of the picture, Joe falls for Graciela (Saldana) and marries her, although there isn't a lot of screen time dedicated to their romance to make it truly compelling. In Florida, Joe runs afoul of the local KKK, the town's police chief Figgis (Cooper), and the chief's daughter Loretta (Fanning), who travels to Hollywood with dreams of stardom and comes home a recovering heroin addict who finds Jesus and whips up public support against Joe's proposed casino.
Joe impractically orders Loretta not to be touched, which doesn't sit well with Masso (who wants to see gambling legalized in Florida and the casino built). The movie doesn't say why he draws the line with her. Are there spiritual elements to Joe which were fleshed out more in the Dennis Lehane novel on which this film is based? We don't know, but at first Loretta is an enemy then in a 180 degree plot twist, becomes a depressed doubter of her own faith who confides in Joe about her issues. Loretta conveniently exits the film, but not before we scratch our heads at the twists and turns of her character which didn't quite fit.
Affleck is at home in the role and maybe he has ideas about Joe that don't translate to the screen. At times, Affleck plays the role of a 1920's gangster with too much of a contemporary vibe, but we focus more on our ambivalence toward him. There is plenty of gun violence, explosions, fights, and double crosses which are part of any gangster epic, but Live by Night never builds on the scenes which work. It wants to be a memorable crime film, but it knows the words and not the music.
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