Review: Live By Night

Ben Affleck has been a promising director for some time now, including the Best Picture winning Argo. Live By Night ends this streak sadly. While it is easy to see what appealed to him from Dennis Lehane's source novel but Affleck does little to add to the tired gangster genre.

The biggest issue of Live By Night is there is simply too much plot here for a film. The material begs for a longer platform. As a result, the film takes on the curious feeling a two-hour "previously on" that hits all the big plot points but never has time for the emotional beats needed for engaging storytelling.

Bear with me now as I attempt to lay out the plot. The film centers around Joe Coughlin (Affleck in love with himself as a gangster). He is the son of a Boston police captain (Brendan Gleeson) who comes back from WWI disillusioned with American. He quickly turns to bootlegging and gets caught between two mob bosses. After falling for one of them's girl (Sienna Miller) only to get caught, he vows revenge and moves to Tampa to oversee the rum business of a rival mob boss. Down there he finds a new life and love in a half-Cuban hottie played by Zoe Saldana. While in Florida he battles the KKK, fights a teenage evangelist(Elle Fanning) over gambling, ruins the life of a police captain (Chris Cooper) and eventually sees a way to get his revenge.

The gangster films that Affleck wants to pull from here were quick and nasty affairs. Live By Night is bloated and dense to the point of being boring. When a film allows for no time to feel anything that is happening, it becomes to easy to check out of the story.  Affleck is miscast in the lead role. It is easy to see why he wanted to play it but he is too smitten with himself in giant cream-colored suits to care. The one saving grace might be Chris Messina as his business partner in Florida. Messina is clearly having a bit of fun. The other is Elle Fanning. The scenes with her are when the film really feels alive. It is too bad she has only three scenes.

Affleck is talented both as actor and director. Live by Night is a testament that everyone has missteps. As a performer, he is sleepy and too brooding all the time. He comes off as mopey rather than haunted. As a director and screenwriter, Affleck doesn't know what to do with the massive storyline of Lehane's novel. He crams in so much and yet the film yields so little.

2/5