Affleck takes himself too seriously in ponderous 'Night'
The first thing that director Ben Affleck should have suggested to his screenwriter, Ben Affleck, would be to lose the voice-over narration lifted from his source material, Dennis Lehane's period crime drama "Live By Night."
Tough-guy interior monologues fit fine in film noiry features and on the pages of pulp novels. But in this particular 1920s Prohibition saga of an outlaw who hates bossy people, speeches such as "I realized you can't just be strong enough to break the rules; you must be strong enough to make your own!" come off heavy-handed and over-the-top.
The second thing that director Affleck should have considered: a different main star.
As Irish thug Joe Coughlin, Affleck moves through his scenes like a squared-off block of granite swaddled in more suits than Trump University.
He carries his monotoned voice-over delivery into his character, a low-key guy who never musters the grit and intensity of an angry gangster working his way up to being "as cruel as he needs to be."
"Live By Night" opens with Joe explaining that fighting a war in France made him vow to never take orders again.
"I went away a soldier," Joe the narrator tells us, "and I came back an outlaw!"
He returns to Boston where he and two Italian sidekicks knock off banks until Irish gang boss Albert White (Robert Glenister) recruits him to fight Italian mob boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone).
Joe's more interested in White's mistress, a perky flapper named Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). If White ever discovered their affair, they'd be painfully dead.
"But we were in love, and we were stupid!" Joe the narrator tells us.
Honest Police Deputy Superintendent Thomas Coughlin (Brendan Gleeson), Joe's dad, tries to break up the couple for their own good, but it takes a botched bank heist and two dead cops to give Joe three years in jail to think about his choices.
The story takes a change of scenery when paroled Joe moves to Tampa where he and his right-hand guy Dion (an ebullient Chris Messina) work with the Italians to knock off White's control over the Florida rum business.
Joe falls for a black Cuban immigrant named Graciela (Zoe Saldana), runs afoul of the local KKK (personified by a menacing, mentally malfunctioning Matthew Maher) and must deal with a born-again daughter (a luminous Elle Fanning) of a pious sheriff (Chris Cooper).
"Live By Night" works a bit like Affleck's directorial crime drama debut "The Town," filtered through Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," with Lehane's adapted story coming off worse for the compassion.
Periodic gunfights, beatings, car chases and assassinations prop up the drama, a joyless experience that takes itself, and especially its leading man, way, way, too seriously.
Editor William Goldenberg creates a few well-executed action set pieces, but the rest of "Live By Night" lumbers along like Affleck's Joe, as if Affleck the director erroneously assumed that long takes and cutaway shots (look at those cute dolphins following that boat!) somehow imbued the movie with epic qualities.
"Powerful men don't have to be cruel," Joe the narrator tells us.
But they should at least be interesting, a quality that this director can't quite extract from his leading man.
“Live By Night”
★ ★
Starring: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 128 minutes