Live By Night

Overview

If Sad Affleck didn't already exist, Live By Night might've made the meme happen anyway. The actor rarely appears particularly engaged in the prohibition-era gangster flick — and given that he's not just the star, but the writer-director too, that's a little bit of a problem. Sure, the plot throws up plenty of reasons for his sorrowful expression, and yes, brooding over what it means to be a man living a life of crime requires an absence of smiles. Still, Affleck largely just looks lost and glum rather than convincingly conflicted or troubled. To make matters even more trying for audiences, he also can't seem to tear the camera away from his own face.

Live By Night isn't the first time Affleck has directed himself, with The Town and Oscar-winner Argo both listed on his resume. Thanks to the former, it's not the first time he has pondered masculinity and violence, or the difficulties of trying to do the right thing by the wrong means. Staying in well-worn territory, his latest flick is also his second adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane, with the author penning the book that Affleck's excellent helming debut, Gone Baby Gone, was based on. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but what it really inspires here is a movie that matches his on-screen look: poised and polished, but bland from top to bottom.

When the film first introduces Affleck's character, World War I veteran Joe Coughlin, it's with an anti-authoritarian attitude; "I left a soldier, I came home an outlaw" his voiceover bluntly offers. Discovering just how far down that path the Boston crook will go is one of the aims of the game, along with probing the darker side of the American dream. At first, Coughlin just wants little more than to break the rules and bed a hotshot mobster's mistress (Sienna Miller). But when his romantic bliss ends, he switches to revenge and bootlegging booze in Tampa. An alliance with the local Cuban population, including his new girlfriend Graciela (Zoe Saldana), earns the ire of the Ku Klux Klan, while trying to build a casino draws opposition from a wannabe actress turned born-again preacher (Elle Fanning).

There's no shortage of plot driving Live By Night as it meanders through its 129-minute running time. As forces of good and evil clash in a variety of ways, Coughlin wears a number of hats (literally and figuratively), firmly establishing that a well-meaning gangster's existence is painted in shades of grey. Of course, if you've seen The Godfather, Goodfellas or any other American effort in the genre, you've already toyed with these themes more than once. Other than following in their footsteps, there's not much more this movie has to offer.

That's not to say that the project is entirely without merit. Though he keeps frowning in front of the camera, Affleck finds some much-needed directorial spark in the film's late shootouts — so much so that you'll wish that he'd done so much earlier. Set in the 1920s, Live By Night also looks the sumptuous part, but sadly that attention to detail doesn't extend to the supporting characters. The less said not only about Saldana's thankless, throwaway role, but Chris Messina's exaggerated performance as a supposedly comic offsider, the better. Although even then, they still seem less miserable than Affleck.