It’s incredibly hard to believe that the same man who directed Argo, The Town, and Gone Baby Gone is the very same one who directed this mess of a mobster film. Live by Night tries so hard to be an epic mobster movie (in this case based on a Dennis Lehane novel) but tries to tackle too many things at once. Combine an aimless plot with wooden acting and leaden dialogue, and you’ve got Live by Night.
Affleck plays Irish-American Joe Coughlin, living in 1920s Boston and doing small bank heists as a big “eff you” to the authority he came to resent as a solider in World War I. Coughlin is smart and stays under the radar, being especially careful to stay away from the violent skirmishes between the Irish and Italian mobs. But as is wont to happen in these sorts of stories, he’s stupid when it comes to women. Coughlin falls in love with Emma Gould (Siena Miller) a beautiful Irish girl who just so happens to be the girlfriend of Albert White (Robert Glenister), head of the Irish mob. After a convoluted set of events, suffice it to say that Coughlin ends up in Tampa, Florida, running an illegal rum business during prohibition on behalf of Italian mob boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone). With Emma presumed dead, he falls in love with black Cuban immigrant Graciela Suarez (Zoe Saldana), sister to his molasses supplier.
I’ve only scratched the surface of the many, many plotlines in the film. There’s also Coughlin’s father, a long-time Boston police deputy (Brendan Gleeson), his best friend and business partner Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), heroin-addict-turned-religious-evangelical Loretta Figgis (Elle Fanning) and her father, Tampa Chief Figgis (Chris Cooper) not to mention his run-in with the KKK. Each thread lacks a delicate touch, instead relying on cliche dialogue before quickly moving on to the next thing. It’s clear that in trying to create a mob movie spanning many years, Affleck couldn’t bear to part with a single storyline so decided to keep them all and force it into a bloated film with more than two hours run time.
The other baffling outcome of Live by Night is its lackluster performances. With a cast as big as this one, you would think the performances would help even out the terrible script. Unfortunately, it seems like no one really wanted to show up, perhaps most of all Affleck himself. Again, thanks to his previous endeavors, we know the guy can be good and charming when he wants. And yet in this film he’s completely wooden, standing around looking uncomfortable in his ill-fitting, oversized suits from the past. The female characters, all three of them, primarily exist to fuel Coughlin’s or other male characters’ emotional motivations and thus are never flushed out enough for us to care about them. Even characters in the action scenes seem clinical instead of passionate and even though there are machine guns and bloodshed, no one manages to spill blood on their suits.
It’s a complete shame that Live by Night seems to have derailed early into production to wind up with such a bloated, incomprehensible mess. But hey, I guess Affleck had been on a bit of a hot streak as a director, so a stinker was bound to pop up. Unfortunately for him it comes on the heels of flops like The Accountant and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But just like Coughlin (or any mob boss), you can’t keep a man like Affleck down for long. Here’s hoping Affleck’s execution of future films is less headache-y than Live by Night.
