Live By Night

The Demon Rum
or
Neither Blood Nor Faith

The opposite of love isn't hate; the opposite of love is indifference. I didn't love Ben Affleck's new film Live By Night; I didn't hate it, either. But it did make me indifferent.

That's an odd reaction because I loved, and was impressed by, Affleck's previous adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone (which was also his directorial debut and started him on an impressive director career, which culminated in his winning the Oscar for directing Argo—which I found the weakest of his films, until this). One should be careful of high expectations as they just set you up for disappointment, which could be a sub-text for the entire film, if it wasn't such an exemplar of the sentiment.

When we start, Joseph Coughlin (Affleck in the lead) is a veteran of the first World War, one of the "lost generation," who come back to his native Boston to take up a career as a small-time robber. A raid on a high-stakes poker game sets him for a lot of scrutiny both from the Boston police and by a top hoodlum, Albert White (Robert Glenister). Seems that Joe has an "inside man" on the poker heist, that being White's woman, Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). What drives them together one can hardly say. She's pretty, okay, but unconventional more than attractive, and that must be the attraction, because Coughlin is in love, or as his policeman father (Brendan Gleeson) says, "Crazy isn't love."

Maybe that's it. She's everything he's rebelling against—his father, the law, his enemies. Maybe after coming home from the war, he must think he has some magic touch, but he's proven wrong, when after a bank robbery gone haywire, he gets beat up by White and his goons and Emma Gould is murdered, and as the robbery has ended up killing three policeman in a wild chase, his father won't touch him, either (except to maybe lean on the local Inspector to let Joe off with a light prison sentence).

When Joseph gets out of prison, he swears revenge on White and signs on with the Pescatore mob—something he'd previously been unwilling to do, not considering himself a "gangster"—but Pescatore has a burgeoning rum smuggling interest in Tampa, Florida that White is muscling in on, and, working for the Italian, Coughlin becomes an enforcer for the mob, swatting away encumberments that might keep the activities from making a profit, like the local chapter of the Klan, or non-negotiating politicians and the local chief of police (Chris Cooper). Things come easily to Joe, who starts to relax just long enough to start a romance with one of his rum partners (Zoe Saldana), as he tries to thread a more moral path while being a mob-boss, an exercise that ultimately will prove an exercise in futility. What, this guy's never seen a gangster movie?

And it is the same old gangster movie, unfortunately. The only thing that separates Joe Coughlin from the rest of the clans of movie-mobsters is that he is less insular, less xenophobic than most gangsters. Traditionally, in movies, the mobs, the gangs, have always been substitutes for family, Coughlin's estrangement from his Poppa-Cop being the film's catalyst. Whereas most of these films draw lines along racial, religious, or ethnic divides, Live By Night's Coughlin is an equal-opportunity bag-man. Associates are associates by experience, not by blood or faith. So, Joe may be somewhat forward-thinking, grant him that, by fighting such types as Klansmen and opportunistic religious zealots, all the while providing the population with distractions in vice, the impact of which we are not given the opportunity to see.

He might have good intentions, but he's still a criminal, or (as one character puts it) "just a bandit in a suit." Does it really make any difference what his liberal social views are, when they have no basis in any moral fabric than the kind you find in greenbacks?

One feels no kinship with the character, though his heart may be steering him in the right places, his hands are not. I've always found the "mobster with a heart of gold" trope to be absurd, bordering on the laughable, like Al Capone being the defacto Mayor of Chicago. Live By Night carries through-line, straight-faced throughout, without any of the rough or cock-eyed perspective of a creator who might have a more secure moral foot-hold. It wants us to feel sympathy for the devil, but only because they might be less repugnant than his enemies. Even the most glorifying of the mobster-pics, The Godfather, knew enough that, though the story of Michael Corleone is a tragedy, he is still a monster, someone whom we might sympathize with, but never cherish.

Affleck, as a director, has been attracted to moral quandries with no easy answers and tough choices. But Live By Night is such a simplistic, wrong-headed film that he seems to have lost his way in the morally murky Florida swamp. Where before he had a sure directorial hand, here his action sequences are hodge-podge and confusing, especially in a fire-fight in a genteel hotel, where you just have trouble distinguishing the "good guys" from the "bad guys" (if there are any). And though he's gotten good work from his cast and his eclectic director of photography, the eclectic Robert Richardson, too often it's at the expense of "window-dressing," pretty pictures that look impressive, like a shining wax apple, but with none of the pulp, "the juice," or anything at its core.

After The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola for many years resisted Paramount's increasing entreaties to make a third film giving as the reason "gangsters are boring." I've rarely seen a boring gangster film, although I have seen bad gangster movies (Gangster Squad and Mulholland Falls, for instance). Martin Scorsese has managed to keep gangster films that both deconstruct, and find new life and depth, in the genre. But, Affleck, even with his past expertise at bringing life to Lehane and his themes, cannot bring anything enlightening to this. 

Yeah, I'm with Coppola on this one: gangsters are pretty damned boring.