LIVE BY NIGHT (8 out of 10) Written and Directed by Ben Affleck, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; Starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Titus Welliver; Rated R for strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity; Running time 128 minutes; In wide release January 13, 2017.
There’s a new member of the classic gangster genre. Ben Affleck’s latest pulls the best out of Dennis Lehane’s novel about a Boston hoodlum caught between the Irish and Italian mob who ends up becoming the rum kingpin of Central Florida during Prohibition. And while not without its faults, it proves The Batffleck to be worthy of those Oscars he’s won for writing and directing.
This is very similar tonally to other Affleck work, specifically his other organized crime thriller The Town and a previous adaptation of Lehane’s work, Gone Baby Gone. But even more than those, Affleck draws from the best of the gangster drama genre — very specifically The Godfather and The Godfather Part II — and delivers a worthy companion to those films.
While it can play at times as a bit derivative, what it should be applauded for are its unique qualities. Specifically, Affleck is able to delve into this idea of his main character, Joe Coughlin, and what it means for him to be a good man. Always saying he is an “outlaw” rather than a gangster, he has a different code of honor than those around him, which inevitably leads to conflict.
Even more refreshing, while Coughlin deals with same basic issues every great crime thriller does, Live By Night deals headlong with issues of race head on, as antagonists include the local KKK. Zoe Saldana shows up as a Cuban revolutionary who almost immediately tells Affleck “I am not romantically interested in you.” You can guess where things go from there. But also remember how this would cause waves in what is, for all intents and purposes, The Deep South. This is one of the first films which tackles the effects of our nation’s original sins of slavery and white supremacy and boldly makes a statement about all of us living on colonized land that did not belong to us. It gets pretty deep with the social commentary for a gangster movie, but never so far that you feel like you’re getting a heavy-handed political message.
They also deal with issues of faith and moral/ethical limits. Rarely in these types of films does your Michael Corleone, etc, ever weigh what lengths they will or won’t go to in their criminal exploits. But Coughlin does, and he approaches his work with a sort of world-weary carefulness. He doesn’t hesitate to commit violence against bad people, but has lines he won’t cross.
This intersects with another main theme of family, as Coughlin deals with his own father, a Boston police superintendent brilliantly played by Brendan Gleeson, and also the literal crime families he is caught between. Also providing an equal counterpoint to Gleeson’s performance is Chris Cooper, who plays the sheriff in Tampa where Coughlin is setting up shop.
This film will also make you believe that you can have action-packed car chases in the Model T era with only revolvers and pump action shot guns. And without relying on “shaky cam,” the scenes are put together straight forwardly so it’s easy to follow what’s going on. Some of the climactic scenes of a shootout in a hotel stairwell are especially good, and show again that Affleck learned his lessons from watching the movies of Coppola and Scorsese.
If there’s one complaint, it’s that the film tries to stuff too much in to one narrative. Notice the discussion about themes above– family, ethics, race… and cool action sequences. While you can get away with this in a novel, there are simply too many thematic threads running through the film that you’re left wondering what the main point of the story was. Instead of one fully-developed theme, we get three quasi-formulated ones.
And like with nearly all projects where one person is writing, directing, and acting, some bits that are perhaps just a bit too precious are left in. Everyone needs a good editor and someone to tell them “no.” Affleck did a great job overall, but needed someone to help check him just the tiniest bit more.
But overall this is an incredibly enjoyable film that, while it covers familiar territory and themes, does so in a new way that pays tribute to the old and helps reinvent into something new. Genre fans will need to check this out, as will anyone who likes Affleck’s crisp directing and dialogue, or just his pretty face.
8 out of 10