Review: ‘Live By Night’ Tries Hard But Can’t Connect With Audience

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One problem about both mafia as well as prohibition era films at this point is that we’ve had so many really good ones that ones that don’t measure up suffer all the more by the invariable comparisons. Live By Night is a frustrating film in that it might have been a good film, had it either had a different director, or a different leading actor.

The film is set in the 1920’s, and Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) has returned from World War I with a disdain for authority and done with playing by rules set by other men. Rather than joining up with the mob, he’s taken to a life as a bank robber and general thief. When he gets caught by the local Irish mob boss Albert White (Robert Glenister) having an affair with his mistress Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), White sets out to kill both Joe and Emma.

Joe survives, but is caught by the police and spends three years in prison for his crimes. When he gets out he reaches out to the Italian mafia don and offers to join them as long as he gets an opportunity to ruin White and his rum operation which has picked up in Tampa, Florida.

Whenever you have this kind of film, you know the general arc that it’s going to take, and there are no surprises. It borrows liberally from everything from Scarface to Untouchables. Ben Affleck’s proven with Argo that he can be a capable director while also being a member of the cast. However it might be that being the lead star of a film plus screenwriter plus director might yet be beyond his abilities.

The film has great cinematography, and captures the feel of the era, but there feels to be editing problems as the various acts of the film don’t always feel like they fit together. Tone and elements of the story appear in one scene, then in the next an entirely new set of threads appear but they don’t really add to what happened before, they just ignore whatever had been happening previously and move on. For example there is one storyline involving the daughter of a local Sheriff who goes to California to be an actress only to have things not turn out as she had hoped, only to return as a born-again proselytizer against sin. When she derails Joe’s plans for a time, it becomes the focus of the film for a short bit, only to be dropped as soon as she exits the frame and not really touched on again.

It felt like many sections like that could have either be excised completely, or should have been expanded on to weave a more comprehensive set of threads to extend throughout the film.

But those weren’t the biggest problem of the film, and that is where Affleck might be finding his biggest challenge as an actor at the moment. He is hard to connect with on an emotional level. In this entire film there never comes a time where the viewer comes to really care or connect with any of these characters in the way that’s needed to take it to the next level. In most cases one would hope that the director would work with the actor to pull their performance out of them. What happens however when the director and the actor are one and the same?

It should be said that it’s not a bad movie, it’s just not one that you’ll reach for again after you’ve seen it the once. And it likely won’t be one that comes to mind when people ask for suggestions for good period gangster films to watch in the future.