Live by Night

Plot synopsis:
Set in the 1920s, the film starts with the voice of Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) discussing his time fighting in France back in 1918 during World War I, and how he witnessed many good men die for nothing. In the years since he returned home to Boston, he had tried to do good, but he would eventually go down a different path.Joe and two of his partners rob a gangster and pretend to take a woman, Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), as a hostage. In reality, Emma was Joe's "inside man", but he is head-over-heels in love with her. Emma is already the girlfriend of the Irish gang boss Albert White (Robert Glenister), but she and Joe see each other whenever Albert is out of town.Joe and Emma have dinner together and are met by Joe's father Thomas (Brendan Gleeson), a police captain. Thomas makes a comment regarding one of Emma's relatives, indicating he disapproves of her. Emma is clearly upset by Thomas's behavior with her over dinner, but Joe tries to assure her that Thomas doesn't have a problem with her.Joe meets Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone), an Italian gangster who is Albert's rival. He wants Joe to take Albert out, otherwise he will let Albert know about Joe's affair with Emma.Joe and his partner Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina) pull off a bank robbery. They are immediately pursued by cops as Joe cannot get the hang of the getaway car, crashing into a civilian car before speeding away. Dion and their other partner make it to another car while Joe stays in the first getaway car. The cops pursue both cars, leading to a chase down the street that ends up causing the cop cars to crash and burn, along with Joe being ejected from his car. When he comes to, he sees the burning cop car in the river and he flees.Joe rushes over to a casino to meet with Emma so they can skip town. They hop inside an elevator and kiss passionately before Emma regretfully reveals it was a trap. One of Albert's large thugs pulls Joe out and starts beating him mercilessly, even kicking Joe in the groin hard enough to make him puke. He is pulled outside where Albert and his goons plan to kill him, but Thomas and his squad arrive, forcing Albert and his men to leave. The cops then arrest Joe.Chief Inspector Calvin Bondurant (Clark Gregg) wants to put Joe in prison for life for the death of the officers, but Thomas blackmails him into giving Joe only three years. Two weeks before Joe is set to be released, Thomas passes away. Joe attends his funeral.With nothing and nobody left for him, Joe goes to Maso and asks for work in getting revenge against Albert. Maso has Joe relocate to Ybor City in Tampa, Florida to be the strongman for Maso's rum business. Joe reunites with Dion and heads down to Ybor to start working. They meet a Cuban businessman named Esteban Suarez (Miguel) to help them out. Joe becomes smitten with Esteban's sister Graciella (Zoe Saldana).Joe and Dion kill Albert's men in Tampa as they horn in on the rum business, much to the gangster's rage. Joe later meets with Chief Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper) to help set up a gambling hotel in collaboration with the Ritz after Maso has asked Joe to get in on the gambling business. The men also meet Irving's daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning), who is heading off to Hollywood with ambitions of becoming an actress.Joe's speakeasy clubs and businesses are attracting a lot of business, and he is personally attracting the attention of Graciella. Although she tells him they will not be lovers, they quickly head into a room to make love.One evening, one of Joe's clubs is disturbed by the KKK putting up a burning cross outside. One of the Klan's member, RD Pruitt (Matthew Maher), terrorizes and robs from the establishments. He also happens to be Irving's brother-in-law. Joe has Irving arrange a meeting with RD. Despite RD being a dimwitted bigot, Joe calmly attempts to negotiate a 15% cut in order for RD to stop harassing people and killing business. RD agrees.Despite the deal, RD starts going around killing Joe's customers out of his racist agenda. Joe and Dion go to meet with the Grand Wizard of the KKK, Gary L. Smith (Anthony Michael Hall), who runs an establishment of his own. Gary informs the men that many Klan members work in the community, including police officers. Since Gary has less power than any of them, Dion shoots Gary dead in front of a bunch of his employees.Joe goes to Irving's house. Irving states that there were 70 witnesses to the murder but nobody is stepping forward to testify. He tells Joe about how Loretta has turned to drugs and prostitution in Hollywood. Joe wants Irving to take care of RD, but Irving can't bring himself to give RD up. He tells Joe to be man enough to kill RD himself.Joe meets with RD outside the Ritz, which is under construction. RD brings two of his goons outside with guns. RD declares he won't stop what he's doing, and he threatens to kill Graciella to Joe's face. Joe takes out his gun and shoots RD dead while Dion and a couple other guys come out of hiding and kill RD's guys. Joe gets shot in the side as a result but he survives. Soon, Joe and his men start fighting back against the Klan, causing them to retreat from Tampa.Loretta returns home and suffers abusive punishment from her father. She begins preaching to the masses in a tent about repenting and making herself an example of the result of sinful living. Because of this, Joe is unable to receive government funding for the Ritz sine Loretta's sermons have put people off from gambling and drugs. This also causes Maso and his gang to distance themselves from Joe and his business.Joe encounters Loretta in a restaurant by herself. She expresses her true feelings over God and her sins, and how she thinks Heaven is already here on Earth. Joe then asks why it feels like Hell. Loretta responds, "Because we fucked up."Dion approaches Joe the next day with a newspaper reporting on Loretta's death, as she slit her throat in her father's bed the previous night. Joe is visibly distraught by the news.Joe visits Esteban and sees a picture he took in a casino, and he sees Emma in the picture after believing her to be dead. Knowing she is in Miami, he decides to go looking for her. He discloses this with Graciella first.Maso and his gang are in Tampa. Joe meets with him in his home, and Maso wants to get rid of Joe despite the expansion of his business, but mainly because of his failure with the gambling venture and for not killing Loretta for bringing it down. He gives Joe the option of working under his son Digger (Max Casella) or to "clean the shit out of his toilet". Joe says he will work under Digger. To Joe's surprise, he learns that Maso is now working with Albert, who is there with a Tommy gun to kill Joe. Joe pulls out the picture of Emma, and he finds out that even Albert didn't know she was still alive. Soon, Joe's men start coming in from the tunnels, which Maso figures out is how they have been getting rum and drugs through. Joe's men start killing Maso's men while Joe fights Albert. Dion and a few other guys go in with their guns and shoot Maso's guys and throw them over the staircase. Joe kills Albert by shooting him through the wall. He waits for Maso as he goes to fix himself a drink. After telling Maso that Digger is dead, Joe shoots Maso in the chest, killing him. Afterwards, Joe hands his business over to Dion, who takes the men under his wing. Joe's voiceover states that Dion ran the business for eight years and did not live to see old age as he had predicted.Joe finds Emma working outside a brothel. She explains how she faked her death by having her driver run their car into the river, and she took refuge with a fisherman. Emma says she loves the feeling of being free. Joe asks if she ever loved him the way he loved her. She makes it clear that she didn't feel the same way. Joe leaves her for good.Joe and Graciella move to Miami and start their own business building houses for the poor. They have a son,Tomas (Gabriel L. Silva), named after Joe's father.One afternoon, Irving, who has now gone mad after Loretta's death, goes over to the Coughlin house and starts shooting while yelling "Repent! Repent!" Graciella rushes to protect Tomas as Joe goes outside and shoots Irving dead. Unfortunately, Graciella was shot and killed. Joe cries over her body. She is later buried in her native home of Cuba.Joe continues to do right by his son. He takes him to the movies and sees that his brother wrote the film. Joe's voiceover states that Tomas wants to grow up to be a police officer. He talks about wanting to see his mother in Heaven. Joe says he tells his son what Loretta told him - Heaven is already there on Earth.

Tags: revenge, violence, romantic

Review:
In both directing and writing the screenplay (based on a novel by Dennis Lehane), Affleck has aimed for a "Godfather" style gangster epic and missed: not missed by a country mile, but missed nonetheless.Morally bankrupted by his experiences in the trenches, Joe Coughlin (Affleck) returns to Boston to pick and choose which social rules he wants to follow.
In my experience it's never a good sign when the writer considers it necessary to add a voice-over to the soundtrack, and here Affleck mutters truisms about his thoughts and motives that irritate more than illuminate.The sheer volume of players in the piece (there are about three film's worth in here) and the resulting minimal screen time given to each allows no time for character development.
Unfortunately the result is that you really care very little about whether people live or die and big plot developments land as rather an "oh" than an "OH!".Affleck puts in a great turn as the autistic central character whose condition results in a cold, calculating demeanor and a complete lack of emotion reflecting on his face.
"Live By Night" sees star Ben Affleck back in the director's chair for the 4th time, his previous directorial offerings being "Gone Baby Gone", "The Town", and best picture winner "Argo", and sadly, it's easily his worst.
"Live By Night" boasts a wonderful cast, stunning cinematography, and enthralling action set pieces but lacks any emotional weight or an interesting story, it's your usual by the numbers gangster flick about tough guys in over-sized suits blasting each other with Tommy guns and stabbing each other in the back.
Like Affleck, the film is listless except when Tommy Guns take charge.As Joe navigates from a low-rent lover, Emma (Sienna Miller), to a classy love, Graciella (Zoe Saldana), director Affleck spends too much time on their embraces and too little on what makes him love them so passionately.
The movie also touches upon the more political/racial/religious aspects of the era, such as where police captain Chris Cooper tells Affleck he will turn a blind eye as long as he keeps his business to the bad (read: non-white) part of town (and of course there's the KKK as already mentioned above).
Live By Night is a gangster epic which follows the rise to power of Joe Coughlin, a young Boston criminal who ends up running an empire in Florida for the Italian mob.
As with The Town and Argo, Affleck casts himself in the leading role and is joined by an impressive supporting cast including Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Elle Fanning, Robert Glenister, Chris Cooper and Brendan Gleeson.The film begins with Coughlin, as the narrator, introducing himself as a veteran who has returned disillusioned from WW1 to the extent that he refuses to follow rules or take orders from anybody.
Combined with Affleck being so prominent in his leading role, his decision as the director to use so many facial close-ups and lingering shots of Coughlin means that Live By Night essentially feels like a self indulgence piece.
In a nutshell, this movie sucked!!!Ben Affleck is an assured director with a some good films under his belt such as "Gone Baby Gone," "The Town," and the academy award winner "Argo." "Live By Night" had great potential but squandered it with an uninvolved, overstuffed, boring, rushed, lackluster and turd-infested flop.
Actor/writer/director Ben Affleck tries his hand at a period piece in this ambitious crime saga beginning in the 1920s Prohibition Era. Joe Coughlin—the son of a renowned Boston police officer—is a small-time crook looking to make a name for himself in the ruthless underworld of organized crime.
2016's "Live by Night" (R, 2:09) is based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane (whose earlier books "Gone, Baby, Gone", "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island" also made it to the big screen) features a main character similar to that of Michael Corleone in "The Godfather", but isn't as interesting.Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck, who also adapted Lehane's novel and directs) is the son of a Boston police captain (Brendan Gleeson) and a veteran of World War I, an experience which definitively shaped Joe's outlook on life.
Joe rises to the challenge as he has to battle the local Ku Klux Klan (embodied by Matthew Maher and Anthony Michael Hall) for business and personal reasons, but also shows his underlying humanity as he helps free a young woman named Loretta (Elle Fanning), the daughter of local Sheriff Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper), from being exploited while trying to become an actress in L.A. Joe has to confront a new set of challenges when Loretta emerges from her personal turmoil as a popular revivalist and preaches loudly about the evils of gambling, just as Joe is building a casino."Live by Night" is a half-way decent but forgettable gangster movie.
Granted Affleck thinks he is his own God, like most of the liberal actors today in Hollywood, and parts of the critics comments have valid points, but what everyone seems to be missing is that 'Live by Night' is just a damn good movie to watch...period.
I haven't seen Gone Baby Gone for many years but when I did see it I don't remember being to fond of it but since then I have been consistently blown away by his work as a director so I was incredibly excited for Live By Night and while it was far from what I hoped I didn't find the nearly as poor as some critics.Like all Affleck's movies this film looks stunning, the production design is immaculate and definitely took inspiration from other films of its type in the best possible way.
Zoe Saldana is fine but didn't have a lot of to her and I didn't like her romance with Affleck.This film has a lot of flaws however, most of them come from the second act, it is very dull, I didn't care for most of the new characters who were introduced, the setting wasn't nearly as interesting as it was in the first act and as I said the romance that blooms between Affleck and Saldanas characters didn't do much for me.Another big issue with this movie was that it relied to heavily on dialogue to tell its story, I'm not opposed to a film that's dialogue driven but in a gangster film you need to back words up with actions and this film rarely did that doing more telling than showing.
Written, directed and produced by the lead himself, a run-of-the-mill, roaring '20's gangster flick lacking in imagination; a quickly-forgotten, unremarkable tale.Our story begins in a glamorized 1920's Boston; Joe Coughlin (Affleck) is a WWI-veteran and small-time hoodlum with a nepotistic bail-out and a forbidden love-affair.
I found myself almost wanting to take a well-deserved nap during the screening, for I felt that I wouldn't miss much and if I had would have woken up more than capable of still keeping up with the films' 'plot'.Ben Affleck seemed a weak link in an already weak chain - his dry performance only made worse by his failure to direct the rest of the notably irritating cast (namely, Elle Fanning and Sienna Miller, although Zoe Saldana was disappointingly bland).
There are times when I say you must see a film on the big screen at the movie theater.The new Ben Affleck film, LIVE BY NIGHT, is one that is perfect for viewing at home on a cold, Saturday afternoon, curled up on the couch with a pillow and a blanket, for it will help you fall asleep and you can take a wonderful nap.This move is D-U-L-L and B-O-R-I-N-G.Written, directed and starring Affleck from a novel by Dennis LeHane (GONE BABY GONE, MYSTIC RIVER), LIVE BY NIGHT tells the tale of a Gangster, Joe Coughlin (played by Affleck) in the 1930's.
It might have worked had Affleck fleshed out the other characters, but casting strong actors like Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller and Zoe Saldana does not a character make.
Each of these are in the film fleetingly and only serve as vessels for Affleck's character to bounce off of, so, in the end we don't care about any of them - it is a waste of these talents and a waste of our time.Affleck does try to make something of Chris Messina's character as Coughlin's best pal and right hand man, but Messina just isn't strong enough to overcome the weak script and character development delivered to him.Affleck's script and direction are also dull, lifeless and clinical - professionally made, but with no heart, soul or emotion and in the end it left me cold and uncaring about the events unfolding.There is a good movie in this idea, this wasn't it.Letter Grade:  "C"4 stars and you can take that to the Bank(ofMarquis).
But although his actions during the two hour runtime certainly make him seem like an asshole, the film constantly tries to market him as the good guy and desperately tries to give him a moral profile.Aside from that, Ben Affleck generally felt miscast and at times even completely out of place.
There are four things wrong with this movie, and all of them are named Ben Affleck.As lead actor, writer, director, producer, sorry but he has to take the blame for this snooze-fest.In all fairness, the music also sucks..More than anything, although the basic story is good the script is somewhat lackluster and fails to spark any passion, but also Ben Affleck is terribly out of his acting range in the lead role and never really conveys the essence of a person from the time period.Visually, the movie looks pretty great and the action sequences are very well done.This could have been another great crime movie with a different musical score and more appropriate lead actor and a little harsher editing..
It's hard for Affleck who produced, directed, and stars in Live By Night as he is the son of a police chief in Boston.He gets caught up in a turf war between rival gangsters Remo Girone and Robert Glenister after a narrow escape from death and a prison term goes to work for Girone who asks him to organize in Florida and he chooses Tampa as his base.
Ben Affleck is a master class, having done a great job with Gone Baby Gone, The Town (my personal favorite of his), and Argo, and so I was looking forward to seeing what he did with "Live By Night." Having missed out on it in theaters, I picked up the blu-ray and I have to say that though I do think that out of this group of films listed above this is his weakest effort, this is a very underrated film.
This was one of the major, crushing disappointments of the year and, if anything, this may be more of a misfire than Batman v Superman; at least with Zack Snyder, you know that it's a crap-shoot for it to be any good and the odds are not in one's favor (and, actually, Affleck was the best part of that movie, with terrific charisma and personality and anger built well for that character, poorly written as it was at times).But with Affleck he's shown with three directed feature films that he has a terrific control of tone, engaging and entertaining characters, stories that carry at least a modicum of moral complexity (Gone, Baby, Gone, which was my least favorite of those, seems to be leaps and bounds stronger than this when it comes to that), and some solid sense of humor and pathos (at least through Argo).
I question what was going through his head when he got behind and in front of the camera.Another critic, I think on Birth-Movies-Death, said that this feels more like what one might expect a directorial debut to be like: a vanity project where its writer-director-producer-star is playing one of those seemingly amazing gangster bad-asses (oh, did I say gangster, sorry, his character doesn't want to be called a 'gangster' for some reason), while also being, at least eventually, a Great White Hope character because...
I love the films that ben affleck has directed and I think he has been giving great performances consistently for the past few years so I was interested to see live by night but unfortunately it was a pretty big disappointment.
It so happens that when some of the characters start exhibiting a fair bit of promise, they're quickly written off/killed (like Sienna Miller's Emma Gould or Elle Fanning's Loretta, the daughter of Chief Figgis).The first half revolves around events that take place in Boston while the second frantically moves on to Tampa, a transition that implies enhancement in Joe's activities as a gangster but never as a captivating movie character.
The story was also involving - at running time 2 hours i wasn't bored for a second.Overall, "Live by Night" is a good movie overall, but not as good as previous films created by Ben Affleck.
Live by night - a very good movie "gangsters / mafia" with a superb Ben Affleck..
If I don't care about who lives or who dies in your movie, then you've got a serious problem on your hands.Ben Affleck is a great director, but is he a good actor?
At the time of writing it's been reported that Ben Affleck's gangster passion project Live by Night will lose its studio Warner Brothers an estimated $75 million dollars upon initial release, with the films only hopes of delivering on its hyped potential the chance it finds an audience once it enters the home video market.2016 surely will be a year Ben Affleck would rather forget.After personnel issues played out in the public spotlight, the increasingly mocked release of Batman V Superman, the good not outstanding The Accountant (which at least performed quite well on a limited budget) and sad Affleck memes, Live by Night felt like a chance for Affleck to end his forgettable year on a high but this visually impressive yet emotionally lacking adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name just never does enough to become the film Affleck so clearly wanted it to be, even if the final product is far from the out and out failure many critics have unfairly labelled it to be.The weakest directional outing yet for Affleck, on the back of 3 previous impressive films, Live by Night sees the filmmaker, screenwriter and actor try so very hard to make the "big" crime epic that lay within his grasp but Affleck seems unable to find the foundation of what was needed to do so stemming from tonal issues, undeveloped side characters and plot lines and the feeling that Affleck miscast himself in a lead role he feels out of place playing.Playing solider turned outlaw Joe Coughlin in the prohibition era of America, Joe is a rather cold central figure in proceedings and while the film try's to find reasons for us to like Joe, whether it's his relationship with fellow Irish girl Emma Gould (played by the underused Sienna Miller) or the films underplayed romance with Zoe Saldana's Cuban Graciela, it's hard to get to invested in Joe's rather slow way of enacting out revenge on those that have wronged him, even if many of the films various components and sideplot's provide evidence of the film Live by Night could've been.From the meddling Ku Klux Klan (scenes involving Matthew Maher's redneck Klan's member RD Pruitt are a highlight), Chris Cooper's brilliant turn as kind hearted local police Chief Figgis or Elle Fanning's scene stealing appearance's as drug addled wannabe actress turned local town religious preacher Loretta Figgis, a turn that makes a great double bill for the young actress when you count her impressive work in the future cult classic The Neon Demon, Live by Night certainly covers a lot of ground (perhaps too much for a mere feature film) and while there's little fault to be found in the films set design and production, without that emotional investment, Live by Night was only ever going to achieve a certain level of mid-tier success.A disappointing experience when all at hand is given due consideration, Live by Night still showcases glimpses of Affleck's talents as a director (again he shows the ability to draw out terrific acting turns) that make Live by Night a polished feature but a cold experience made worse by the films failure to ever really get the blood pumping (gangster film fans should lower their expectations when it comes to the thrills and spills stakes).Not a bad film but a film that time will likely forget, Live by Night is the work of a filmmaker whose previous works have so far been anything but and therefore a rather unfortunate product of bad timing and an appearance in a public's frame of mind where it has once again become the "it" thing to kick Ben Affleck while he is down but if history has shown us anything, we can expect a turnaround from Mr. Affleck in the not too distant future.3 ½ convenient tunnels out of 5.
Ben Affleck might not be the best actor ever but he did a good job directing and playing in this movie.
Americans really know how to put together stuff like this, and they have done so many times, which doesn't work for Affleck's favor.On the other hand, if you haven't seen enough of this kind of stuff, "Live by Night" offers everything the genre fan needs: good story, exciting action, convincing characters, really good cast of actors...
Live By Night tells the story of gangster Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) as he rises, falls then rises again through the criminal underworlds of Boston and Miami.