Live by Night

This is a shout out for all those who can remem­ber that bygone era known as the ​’90s: a man named Kevin Cost­ner, an actor who occa­sion­al­ly direct­ed, had a unquench­able predilec­tion for build­ing films around the notion that he would get to play Jesus. Or if not Jesus, then some kind of non-denom­i­na­tion­al extrap­o­la­tion of said. A taint­ed, earth­bound mes­si­ah. All has gone qui­et at Camp Cost­ner, but thank­ful­ly we’ve got Ben Affleck to fly that decade’s demigod flag.

Live by Night is his flubbed but undoubt­ed­ly intrigu­ing fol­low-up to his sur­prise awards mag­net, Argo, from 2012. This is the supe­ri­or film – less behold­en to for­mu­la and more attract­ed to detail and moments of off-the-cuff poet­ry. If Argo was Affleck’s Dances with Wolves, this is his Water­world. There are even shots, such as a stroll on a beach dur­ing mag­ic hour, or a salt maze pat­tern on a table­top, that feel like Affleck was inspired by his role in Ter­rence Malick’s To the Won­der.

It comes across as a case of try­ing to locate a hap­py medi­um between an ​“audi­ence” film, replete with super­fi­cial fun and frol­ics, blood and swear­ing, and some­thing with a lit­tle more grav­i­ty, that has Impor­tant Things to say about the nature of the human soul. This tough equa­tion doesn’t quite pan out.

The film is a 1920s-set gang­ster saga whose plot is divid­ed between the hard cob­bles of Boston in the north and the booze-soaked slur­ry tracks of Tam­pa in the south. Affleck him­self slinks awk­ward­ly into the wide-shoul­dered cream suits and tilt­ed fedo­ras of Joe Cough­lin, a World War One grunt who returns to Amer­i­ca with a bone to pick with the top brass. Hav­ing served his coun­try with hon­our, he now feels its his right to take some­thing back, and so a life of pet­ty crime ensues. Before too long, his anger is par­layed into help­ing out local gang boss­es, who he large­ly resents.

Den­nis Lehane’s chunky 2012 tome is abridged to com­pact the antihero’s jour­ney as he ris­es to a posi­tion of emi­nence as a Pro­hi­bi­tion era rum-run­ner. The inevitable rise-and-fall arc that’s seem­ing­ly hard­cod­ed into such sto­ries is evi­dent, but Affleck can­ni­ly nudges it to the back­drop, lend­ing the film a more episod­ic, diary-like feel. It would be very easy to bemoan the the film’s lack of a sin­gu­lar sweep, but it is more inter­est­ing in its focus on indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions which all even­tu­al­ly fun­nel into a pro­tract­ed climax.

Per­haps the film’s cen­tral flaw is that Affleck has mis­cast him­self as Cough­lin, a rogue with a nice line in smart guy pat­ter with whom you are sup­posed to feel deep empa­thy despite his count­less vio­lent sins (it’s empha­sised reg­u­lar­ly that he only kills awful peo­ple, like KKK mem­bers). Sup­port­ing char­ac­ters played by Chris Coop­er, Elle Fan­ning, Sien­na Miller and Matthew Maher all have more fine shades to them than Affleck’s stock wiseacre lead.

It’s weird to say, but this is one of those rare instances of a film that could’ve been longer to maybe flesh out the dra­ma rather than just the nar­ra­tive. As it stands, it’s an uneven throw­back epic that’s propped up by some ques­tion­able van­i­ty cast­ing by its ambi­tious maker.