Live By Night

In Raoul Walsh’s ‘The Roaring Twenties’, the trenches of the First World War are the cauldron in which loyalty, rivalry and criminality are forged. In Michael Curtiz’s ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’, a spiritual battle for the soul of the gangster is finally decided in an ambiguous closing scene. In Howard Hawks’s ‘Scarface’, the gangster is elevated to tragic hero, pursuing the attainment of the world entire at the cost of everything else.

Ben Affleck’s ‘Live By Night’ merges elements of all of these and more – surely it’s no coincidence that Dennis Lehane, on whose novel the film is based, picked the title for its evocation of Nicholas Ray’s hymn to the romanticism of the outlaw, ‘They Live By Night’ – as it strives to recreate the iconography of classic Warner Brothers gangster movies while engaging in a dialogue pertinent to a contemporary audience.

And to a certain degree the attempt is to Affleck’s credit. As the poet said: a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for? However, in identifying Lehane’s fiction as a potent combination of propulsive genre narrative and intelligent social commentary – previously translated to the screen in fine style in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’ and Affleck’s own directorial debut ‘Gone, Baby, Gone’, and to a slightly lesser degree in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Shutter Island’ – Affleck makes two crucial mistakes.

But we’ll come to those later. For now, take my hand and we’ll waltz through a plot synopsis. Irish-American twenty-something Joe Coughlin (Affleck) comes back from the war pissed off with taking orders and kowtowing to rank. He and some buddies carve out a minor living doing nickel and dime hold-ups until Irish mob boss Albert White (Robert Glenister) recruits him under pressure. Coughlin, not wanting to be a part of any particular gang or organisation, accepts in the spirit of self-preservation and because it puts him closer to White’s flapper girl moll Emma (Sienna Miller, aurally defiling the movie with the worst Irish accent), with whom he’s conducting an affair. Meanwhile, Italian mob boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) tries to persuade Coughlin to assassinate White. His options running out, Coughlin plans one last job to fund his absconsion with Emma. It goes tits up. Meanwhile, a vindictive Pescatore puts the word out to White about Coughlin’s dalliance with Emma. The only thing that saves him from death at White’s hands is the intervention of his police captain father (Brendan Gleeson, to whom Sienna Miller’s Irish accent owes an apology), and even then he still has to take a beating from Coughlin Snr’s cop buddies and do some jail time.

All of which would be enough material to fill a 90 minute feature and yet here is little more than an extended overture (one, moreover, that’s established and rushed through as inelegantly as a bull on steroids manoeuvring its way from the front entrance to the rear exit of an emporium dedicated to the crockery and figurines fashioned from the finest bone china). The main business of the story takes place post-prison sentence as Coughlin, grieving for Emma (presumed dead after her care plunges off a bridge) and burning for revenge against White, sells his soul to Pescatore and finds himself running the mobster’s rum smuggling operation in Tampa. Here, he partners up with Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), muscles White’s crew out of the game, and reaches an agreement with police chief Figgis (Chris Cooper) whereby Coughlin and Bartolo restrict their dealings to specific socio-geographical locations and the cops turn a blind eye. While Coughlin establishes a profitable business relationship with rum distiller Estaban Suarez (Miguel), whose sister Graciela (Zoe Saldana) he romances, Figgis’s impressionable daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning) goes off to Hollywood to be a star but ends up addicted to heroin and forced to appear in skin flicks. When Figgis’s KKK-connected brother-in-law R.D. (Matthew Maher, stealing scenes like Rafferty stole jewels) takes against Coughlin on account of his relationship with the dusky-hued Graciela, Coughlin uses Loretta as leverage to convince Figgis to set R.D. up. Coughlin’s devious machinations are, however, not enough to avoid a full-scale conflagration between Klan and bootleggers.

There’s no doubt that this is the most effective part of the film, even if the pay-off is badly rushed, but again there’s material aplenty in this one plot strand for an entire feature. But Affleck isn’t done yet. With the Klan out of the way, the end of Prohibition looming and a fuckton of Pescatore’s profits sunk into a casino development, Coughlin then has to contend with Loretta’s post-rehab reappearance as a hellfire preacher (yes, Affleck casts the elfin Fanning as a hellfire preacher; yes, that decision works out exactly as you’d expect) and the cold-feet withdrawal of his legitimate business partners on account of the negative publicity Loretta’s anti-vice, anti-gambling, anti-everything-but-God campaign has stirred up. And if that’s not enough, Pescatore has plans to retire Coughlin, it turns out that Emma might not be dead after all, and White has one last hand to play.

Once again, enough material for a whole film is shoehorned into half an hour, with melodrama and cliché piling up against each other. A fantastically staged and edited hotel shoot-out restores some genre kudos to the proceedings, but an extended coda in three acts drags things out that bit longer.

I said earlier that there were two problems with the film. The first is Affleck the writer, the second Affleck the actor. While there’s no doubt that he’s totally engaged with the material as director, he doesn’t yet have the skill as a scriptwriter to translate Lehane into the cinematic medium; and as an actor, he doesn’t deliver the complexity Coughlin’s character calls for, nor does he have any chemistry with Miller or Saldana. (His asexual relationship with Anna McKendrick’s character in ‘The Accountant’ generates more frisson!)

‘Live By Night’ wants to be a sweeping old-fashioned epic but one that turns a contemporary eye to questions of race, religion, politics, loyalty, rivalry, compromise and even social justice (Graciela is driven by restoring dignity and honour to the underclass of her native Cuba). There would have been two ways to do justice to the book: focus on about a fifth of the existing narrative, truncating the timeline and focusing on character interaction (a la Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s ‘L.A. Confidential’), or as a TV mini-series of about five hours. Affleck simply tries to cram too much into his 128-minute running time. Paradoxically, this results not in a frenetic narrative but a plodding and sometimes tiresome one.

That said, there are still things to appreciate. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is a thing of beauty, conjuring some eyeball-searing images: a burning police car sinking into a steely-grey lake; a motorboat slowly cleaving the waters of a lake sheened with the pink/gold of a fireball sun sinking into the horizon; a nocturnal shoot-out in front of the skeletal frame of a half-built casino, laths of timber creating frames within frames within frames. There is also a cluster of fantastic performance – Cooper, Messina, Maher, Glenister, Girone – although this comes at the cost of there not being a single decent role for a woman in the whole thing.

“You get out of this world what you put into it,” Coughlin’s father warns him at one point, “but not always how you might expect.” Coughlin was always going to be blasé about this truism; he was always going to be a compromised protagonist. That the film is equally compromised is the real disappointment.

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’ is no classic. Let’s be completely honest about that. It’s as flawed as ‘Man of Steel’ was. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. The things that don’t work – in particular matters pertaining to Lex Luthor – are hugely awful. The things that do work – in particular matters pertaining to Diana Prince – are as iconic as any fanboy could wish for. The film is a mishmash, and narratively wonky. But does it deserve the outpouring of hatred that the critics have almost unanimously delivered? In my humble opinion, no.

Which isn’t to say that, having emerged from the cinema with a general feeling of I enjoyed that more than I thought I would, I’m going to fashion this review into not just an apologia for ‘B vs S’, but reappraise it as a misunderstood classic of the genre. No, sir. It would be remiss of any reviewer to gloss over the film’s problems, just as it’s lazy of the majority of them to join in the hurling of brickbats.

In the interests of objectivity and balance, let’s acknowledge the faults. First and foremost, the characterisation of Lex Luthor is terrible, partly because Jesse Eisenberg is miscast but mostly because the script (a) gives him some of the most thankless dialogue any actor could find himself saddled with, and – more problematically – (b) fails in establishing any credible motivation for his increasing sociopathic behaviour. And, no, his oft-repeated variations on a theme of man’s victory over God doesn’t really cut it since there’s no moment in his character arc that leads him to this mindset. In fact, he doesn’t even have a character arc. It’s as if the first script conference settled on Lex Luthor as villain based on the rationale that everyone knows he’s the villain anyway so let’s just wheel him onstage and give him villainous things to do and we won’t need to bother with any of that tedious exposition business.

Likewise, the titular Batman/Superman conflict is predicated on very little. Sure, there’s the effective opening sequence where the finale of ‘Man of Steel’ is restaged from Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck)’s perspective as he navigates rubble-strewn and dust-choked streets in an attempt to facilitate his employees’ evacuation while Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod twat each other in an orgy of city-wide destruction and wait a fucking minute, since when exactly was Wayne Industries based in Metropolis? So, yeah, the ultimate superhero anti-hero, a man who was wreaked his fair share of havoc in order to take down bad guys, suddenly goes all antagonistic on Superman because he wreaked havoc in order to take down a bad guy. 

Meanwhile, Clark Kent pursues a media campaign against Batman for little other reason that it gets him off the sports desk. Though why he spends his time at the office getting all moody and embittered when he’s shacked up with the uber-foxy Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is anybody’s guess. Ditto why Lois continually puts her life in danger chasing down stories when she’s just as loved-up herself.

Finally: the flashbacks/dream sequences. They’re piss-poor, on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Really, really piss-poor.

And if you took ‘B vs S’ on the 500 words above, the critical kicking would be easy to understand; in fact, you’d probably feel like grabbing a burning touch and allaying yourself with the village lynch-mob. But said course of behaviour would leave one blind to the pleasures of the film. To whit:

Ben Affleck as Batman. I’ll cop a guilty plea, right here and right now, to face-palming and groaning when I heard the news of Affleck’s casting. And by the same chalk I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I was wrong. Trudging through the metaphorical treacle of a script that can’t even establish a fundamentally plausible motivation for his character, Affleck nonetheless knocks it out of the park in his portrayal of a Batman who is middle-aged, world-weary and descending into an embittered psychosis. This is a not just a Batman who, prior to the titular stand-off, has to force himself through a masochistic training regime and build an armoured suit that it’s effortful even to walk in (in fact, there’s something about seeing the un-suited-up Bruce Wayne pounding at a truck tyre with a sledgehammer that presents an anti-iconography: the training montage actually strips a superhero down to a new personal low), but Affleck is just as acute in his characterisation of Bruce Wayne, showing a jaded multi-millionaire going through the motions of what society expects of him; even the playboy lifestyle and womanising seems forced, to the point where Alfred sneers at him that there’s little hope for a next generation. 

Subject of whom: Jeremy motherfuckin’ Irons. Hot on the heels of his fantastic turn in ‘High-Rise’, he reinvents Alfred to his own specifications within seconds of appearing onscreen. Retaining the Jeeves-like pragmatism of the character’s previous incarnations, Irons adds a level of barbed irascibility and the result is magnificent. In fact, I’d give Irons the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award if it weren’t for …

… Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. Introduced in oblique fashion, with much of her narrative arc and motivation remaining enigmatic for most of the running time, Gadot isn’t given much to do but look slinky and seductive as Prince and wield a sword in menacing fashion as Wonder Woman. Given the script’s total inability to treat a female character as anything other than a plot device, Gadot could easily have come adrift in the melee, her character mere eye-candy in the CGI-driven morass of the final act. But, by God, a former model who I wouldn’t have previously credited as having any claim to cinematic iconography doesn’t just make something out of nothing, she creates bona fide moments of mainstream cool.

Other plus points: Snyder’s commitment to a dark vision of the material – slammed by the critics for humourlessness – yields some genuinely striking moments: the film begins and ends with funerals (Snyder shoots funerals with the same quasi-pornographic delight that Argento at his best reserved for death scenes); Wayne’s contact with a Russian mobster takes place at a grungily ugly bare-knuckle boxing competition; Superman’s coercion into appearing at a congressional hearing is the culmination of a subplot about political showboating/careerism and is full-stopped by a hugely cynical punchline almost calculated to plug into contemporary America’s terrorism fear-factor. Snyder plays it equally dark and cynical in terms of classical allusions, throwing in Icarus, Parsifal and a painting in Luthor’s apartment that’s basically a combination of Gustav Dore and William Blake; there’s even a dream/hallucination sequence where Kevin Costner reappears as Clark Kent’s mortal step-father, staged in such a manner that short of inserting a title card reading “and my father on that sad height” the nod to Dylan Thomas couldn’t be more explicit.

And this is perhaps what ‘B vs S’ offers as an apologia for itself even in the face of its harshest critics. In an era where superhero movies – specifically those of the Marvel ilk – have come to define mainstream cinemagoing, Iron Man and Captain America might flirt around the edges of prescient storylines about the corrupting influence of power and the fear of the unknown, but you’re highly unlikely to stumble across a classical allusion or a debate on the very redundancy of heroism; whereas Snyder, carrying on the dialogue he established in ‘Man of Steel’, batters furiously and incessantly away at the very concept of the genre even as he embraces its most fetishistic excesses.

Argo

Say what you will about Ben Affleck as an actor – and with ‘Gigli’ on his CV, not to mention his casting as Bruce Wayne in the upcoming ‘Batman vs Superman’, there’s certainly enough material for the naysayers – what can’t be denied is that his career as a director is shaping up nicely.

‘Gone Baby Gone’ was a subdued, character-driven adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel graced with a prickly yet nuanced performance by Casey Affleck that took the casting beyond mere nepotism. ‘The Town’ stayed in the crime genre, this time based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, with Affleck starring as well as directing. Like ‘Gone Baby Gone’, it was notable for its literacy, attention to detail and considered performances. Both films were slow burn. The comparisons most critics made to 70s American cinema were deservedly made.

It was inevitable, then, that Affleck would make not just a film that expanded the touchstones of 70s American cinema further – here, the immediate frame of reference is the political thriller – but one that was actually set in the 70s. But unlike his previous outings, ‘Argo’ tells a true story. One that happens to be as ludicrously improbable as you could imagine.

The basic facts are: on 4 November 1979, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized by militants protesting against the overthrown Shah of Iran’s domicile in the US. Embassy personnel were held hostage; their ordeal lasted 444 days. Six people managed to escape and were given sanctuary by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. Their passage out of Iran was facilitated by CIA operative Tony Mendez, who passed them off as members of a film crew scouting locations for a sci-fi epic (parts of ‘Star Wars’, made two years earlier, had been shot in Tunisia).

It’s this element of the story that Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio find most engaging. You see, you can’t just say “hey, border patrol people, we’re a film crew” and not expect your credentials to remain unchecked. Even back then, there’d be enough buzz around a forthcoming movie for details to seep into the media and the popular consciousness. Thus it is that Mendez (played in unemotive fashion by Affleck) persuades his paymasters to fund a Hollywood production (albeit one that the plug will get pulled on the moment the fugitives are clear).

‘Argo’ starts with a tense recreation of the Iranian protest outside the embassy, the subsequent storming of the building and the hostage-taking. The escape of the six seems almost ludicrously easily, but takes nothing away from how palpable the tension is as the Canadian ambassador and his staff – risking a reprise of events at their own embassy – take them in. Mendez’s tasking with their exfiltration also makes for a detailed and immersive sequence, Affleck relishing the slow-burn approach of the 70s classics he so clearly loves.

Then Mendez hooks up with make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and fast-talking impresario Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and ‘Argo’ shifts up a gear and these unlikely team-mates race to complete ad hoc under-the-gun pre-production on an exotic sci-fi spectacular. A script is selected, its general awfulness outweighed by its desert setting; trade ads are rushed into print; a cast assembled; a press event stage-managed at a plush hotel. Affleck finds in the movie’s fake a film a perfect mirror for the falsity of Hollywood and ‘Argo’ attains, in its middle section, a level of sheer satirical brilliance that it can’t possibly hope to replicate for the rest of its not insubstantial running time.

With Chambers and Siegel having done their bit, it’s off to Tehran for Mendez and the real, life-or-death business of his rescue mission. ‘Argo’ starts to develop problems here. The transitions from hostage crisis to CIA think-tank shenanigans to Mendez’s bat-shit crazy (but brilliantly creative) scheme have a kind of breezy logic to them and are effected seamlessly. The shift from Hollywood satire to suspense thriller is less well-oiled. In fact, it’s more like changing from a high to a low gear without bothering to use the clutch. There’s a lurch as the scene changes to Tehranian hotel rooms and the Canadian embassy. Affleck’s staging of a sequence where the six leave the embassy under their new identities only to attract the attention of an antagonistic mob in a bazaar is evidently intended to ramp up the tension as a precursor to the film’s (genuinely suspenseful) airport finale, but there’s no clear point of view and the editing is messy.

The airport denouement (if that’s the right word: the film meanders on for a solid quarter of an hour afterwards) plays out against a team of militant Iranians painstakingly assembling shredded material at the US embassy in order to correlate the number of hostages in captivity. Will they identify the missing six before they’re safely onboard and the plane is in the air? Affleck milks it for all it’s worth, but the result is a white-knuckle piece of cinema for all that, armed militia chasing the airliner even as it taxis down the runway. Problem is, it never happened. Mendez and his charges experienced a delay in boarding on the day, but apart from that they were away scot free.

The other problem, that (to be fair) ‘Argo’ couldn’t have surmounted, is that for the fugitive six the stakes were lower than for the other embassy staff. Only two scenes – one as the embassy is occupied, and one that’s rather awkwardly shoehorned in at the mid-way point – address what the ordeal was like for the actual hostages, blindfolded, mistreated and never knowing from day to day whether they’d be summarily executed. In comparison, while the threat of discovery was very real, the six lived to a fairly decent standard in the Canadian embassy. Moreover, the importance of the Canadians’ role is relegated to a cursory single paragraph note just before the end credits roll.

This review started out by bigging up Affleck’s talents as a director and, despite its flaws, ‘Argo’ hits more high notes than bum ones. It’s further proof that Affleck behind the camera is an infinitely more appealing prospect than Affleck in front of it.

Hollywoodland

George Reeves has some notable credits on his filmography: ‘Gone With the Wind’ (the event movie of 1939), ‘Blood and Sand’ opposite Rita Hayworth, ‘The Fighting 69th’ and ‘From Here to Eternity’.

So you can understand why it was galling for him, returning from a wartime stint in the army and finding it difficult to resume his big-screen career, to don a padded suit and a pair of tights to play Superman in a popular TV series. That TV was, at that time, derided by film-makers and movie actors as a novelty at best and a bastardisation at worst, would only have added salt to the wound.

Reeves died on 16 June 1959, of a gunshot wound to the head. A verdict of suicide was arrived at, though controversy and unanswered questions continue to linger. Indeed, Reeves’s mother engaged the services of a private detective to look into the circumstances surrounding his death.

This fact provides the jumping-off point for Allen Coulter’s slow-burn drama ‘Hollywoodland’. The private eye here is a fictional character, Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), whose burgeoning obsession with the case is comparable to Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal)’s obsession with the Zodiac killer in David Fincher’s film.

Simo is two-bit operator, struggling to maintain a relationship with his troubled son and keep things civil with his ex-wife (Molly Parker). A recent case has gone pear-shaped, his client murdering the allegedly unfaithful spouse he’d hired Simo to follow – a woman Simo dug up no dirt on.

Hired by Reeves’s mother (Lois Smith), this new investigation gives him something to focus on; to delve into; to get too personally involved with. Simo’s sleuthing plays out in counterpoint to a series of flashbacks which chronicle Reeves (Ben Affleck)’s life, beginning with his chance encounter with Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a woman a decade his senior who enjoys an open marriage to MGM troubleshooter Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins) – ie. they both consort with other partners and Eddie’s only going to get pissed off with you if you don’t treat his missus right.

Which makes Eddie a suspect when Reeves splits up with Toni the better to enjoy the attentions of younger society playgirl Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), leaving his former – and eminently supportive and generous – mistress distraught. But as Simo comes to understand just how volatile Reeves’s relationship with Leonore was, he begins to wonder if the solution isn’t significantly closer to home …

Kudos to Coulter and screenwriter Paul Bernbaum: they don’t try to impose a solution on the film. ‘Hollywoodland’ is a mystery sans resolution, like the aforementioned ‘Zodiac’, or Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’. In fact, like that latter film, it’s more a rumination on image and perception. At three key points, Simo finds himself drawn back the house Reeves died in, standing sepulchrally outside while a different possibl scenario plays itself out inside (ie. in Simo’s imagination).

Brody, playing very much against type as a wiseacre P.I., channels the likes of Jack Nicholson in ‘Chinatown’, before peeling back the layers and finding the lost soul within his character. Affleck does some of his best work onscreen, his matinee idol looks and slightly artificial air of suavity ideally suited to a 1950s leading man. Hoskins’s American accent wavers occasionally, but he’s suitably pugnacious as Eddie Mannix; you have no trouble believing that when this man deals with things, they stay dealt with.

The ladies of the cast excel: Lois Smith gives a potent performance as the grieving but irascible mother; Robin Tunney goes all out for white trash high camp as a floozy with a mouth as loose as her morals; and Diane Lane provides the human core of the film, a glamorous and intelligent woman just beginning to fear the future as she edges into middle age. Lane projects grace and dignity, which makes her profanity-spiked comment about Reeves’s new squeeze all the more shocking. It’s the best line in the film and it’ll make you wince. (It’s about smoke rings, by the way.)



Tomorrow: the Diane-fest concludes with 'Unfaithful'.