Aubrey Malone
Live By Night (15A)
The ‘myth kitty’ – if I may borrow Philip Larkin’s famous phrase – of this atmospheric crime flick ranges from The Godfather and Goodfellas through Scarface, The Road to Perdition and Chris Cooper’s Black Mass.
A more immediate reference point might be Ben Affleck’s The Town, which mirrors it in its gratuitous displays of violence if not its historic sweep. Not only does Affleck take the main role, he also directs, produces and writes the (brilliant) screenplay which he partly delivers in a very effective world-weary voiceover.
He plays Joe Coughlin, a ‘bandit in a suit’ who becomes a fully-fledged killer after run-ins with the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan in a cavalcade of underworld adventures during America’s Prohibition era. These take him from Boston to Florida. Here he runs a number of ‘speakeasies’ and seeks revenge on Irish-American gangster Albert White (Robert Glenister). White tries to kill him after he has an affair with his girlfriend Emma Gould (Sienna Miller).
An attempt to expand his operations to gambling in Florida runs into stumbling blocks both from a ruthless mobster and also, more curiously, the daughter of the local police chief (Chris Cooper) who turns to God after curing herself of a drug habit.
Fault
If there’s a fault to be found in a film of such convoluted aspirations it rests, surprisingly, on the shoulders of Affleck himself. His low-key style of acting usually serves him well but it’s misguided here. For a larger-than-life character like Coughlin we needed a star with the acting chops of someone like Al Pacino or Robert de Niro in their prime.
Affleck is too pretty in the role. There should be volcanic outbursts from him considering what he goes through. Instead we just get pursed lips or minor shows of temper.
The film would have worked better if it maintained its intensity throughout. It loses its way after a blistering start before picking up the threads again in the blood-soaked climax.
Aristotle spoke of pity and fear as the two emotions one should experience watching his tragedies unfold. With Affleck, I felt neither of these, just a kind of neutral admiration for his brilliant evocation of the period. We’re meant to feel a kind of catharsis in his heart-wrenching final scene but he doesn’t scrub up to it enough. Ironically, I felt more for Cooper here.
Miller also disappoints. Her character hails from Cork but the accent is a stage-Irish Dubbelin/Noo Yawk hybrid.
And yet this is a film that demands to be seen. One is never quite sure where it’s going – from bootlegging to Bible Belt evangelism – or who’s going to double-cross who.
It exudes an elegiac poetry even as it rides roughshod over every moral compass imaginable.
The epilogue speaks of Heaven but by the time we get to it we’ve been through the seventh circle of hell. It takes a director of some panache to deliver both parameters.
Excellent *****