Live by Night is a gangster movie, to be sure, but director and lead Ben Affleck makes it all about him as it lives and dies with his charisma and acting chops, for better and worse.
To call Live by Night formulaic is not quite right, not in the seen-it-before sense. It is an amalgamation of familiar features: Irish and Italian mobsters, period piece, schlocky love story, political commentary, and an anti-hero with a heart of gold.
It’s the “good guy” nature of Affleck’s Joe Coughlin that is both the driving force behind the story as well as its hinderance to ever getting very far. Oft-times, painting this objectively vicious criminal as the right side to root for is easy, such as when he goes up against the Ku Klux Klan. Who doesn’t like to see those guys get some comeuppance?
His lovable nature also belies some discordant tendencies. While the movie starts off in Boston, in the second act, the story moves south to Florida, where Coughlin takes over the Prohibition-era rum business in the Tampa area. Only a man willing to kill, maim, and destroy can pull off such a feat, and he take over he does. At the same time, he’s a simple, gracious man that Cuban local Graciela (Zoe Saldana) falls for.
This isn’t Tony Soprano with an edgy charm that still cuts all those around him. Coughlin truly seems to do the right thing, even after doing the wrong thing for long enough to find success in a thriving criminal enterprise. This comes to a head during his interaction with young Loretta Figgis, the sugary sweet daughter of the police chief who has come back from an excursion to dreaded California with heroin tracks on her arms and a religious message against Coughlin’s next big venture: gambling.
Loretta’s father is played by Chris Cooper, and without a doubt he takes the cake in terms of individual performances. He’s the law and order backbone of the town, but is practical enough to make allowances for the unavoidable when it comes to speakeasies and such. Cooper can often come off as tightly-wound authoritarian, but here he even mediates between the gangsters and the Klan, represented brilliantly by J.D. Evermore as brother-in-law Virgil, a ridiculously hateful goofball.
Live by Night’s success (or lack thereof) is bound to be seen through the lens of some mythical Hollywood scoreboard. After wins playing The Batman and The Accountant, as well as directing critical darlings Argo and The Town, Affleck has quite a streak going. No matter how his current flick does, there’s no reason to be against him going forward.
