Warner Bros. Pictures
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
2016 was not Ben Affleck’s year: He starred in three films, and none were successes. His performance as Batman in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” was praised but the movie itself was not, marking the beginning of the end for the DC Extended Universe. Affleck’s original action thriller, “The Accountant,” similarly got middling reviews, but it was at least popular enough to get a sequel nine years later.
This brings us to Affleck’s passion project, “Live by Night.” Set in 1926 shortly after Prohibition, the gangster epic follows Boston bank robber Joe Coughlin as he builds a rum-running empire in Florida and falls in love with Cuban criminal Graciela Corrales (Zoe Saldaña). Affleck directed the picture and (mis)cast himself as the 20-year old Joe. Since his last project was the Best Picture-winning “Argo,” you’d think he would deliver again. It wasn’t to be: “Live By Night” bombed and went down as Affleck’s first miss as a director.
“Live By Night” is based on a 2012 novel by Dennis Lehane, who (like Affleck) hails from Boston. The source material has a larger story behind it; “Live by Night” is the second novel in a trilogy following the Coughlin family in the early 20th century. (Though Lehane prefers to think of the books as “three standalones that are connected by a bloodline.”)
Affleck made his directorial debut by adapting Lehane’s “Gone Baby Gone,” the fourth book in the Kenzie & Gennaro detective series. That worked, so why didn’t “Live by Night”? Having read every Lehane book, this writer feels that “Live by Night” is both one of his lesser works and the weak point of the Coughlin trilogy. Even so, you’re better off reading “Live by Night” than watching it, especially since the Coughlin trilogy begins and ends with triumphs.
The Given Day is Dennis Lehane’s best novel
Heritage Images/Getty Images
Lehane made his career writing procedurals and thrillers, but with 2008’s “The Given Day,” he wrote something more literary. A 700+ page tome, “The Given Day” is set mostly in Boston during the late 1910s immediately after World War I ends. The narrative is divided between Luther Laurence, a Black man who moves from Oklahoma to Boston for a fresh start, and Joe’s older brother, Danny Coughlin.
The Coughlin brothers are the sons of police captain Thomas Coughlin (played by Brendan Gleeson in “Live by Night”). Danny, law enforcement royalty, involves himself in the Boston patrolmen’s labor organizing and helps lead the historical Boston police strike of 1919.
Writing detective novels taught Lehane how to weave complex story threads together. He used those skills on “The Given Day” to write a sprawling, ensemble family drama without leaving behind his whip-smart dialogue. One line that hasn’t left me is when Danny ponders that anticapitalists fail to understand the human drive:
“[Communists are] pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The [Bolsheviks] believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host.”
“The Given Day” remains Lehane’s most ambitious novel in historical research and storytelling scope. It’s also his best; only “Mystic River” comes close.
Lehane also works in TV; he wrote for “The Wire” and developed the Apple TV mini-series “Black Bird” and “Smoke.” While he’s said he’s uncomfortable adapting his books into screenplays (Lehane described that as having to “operate on my child” to Massachusetts newspaper the Patriot Ledger in 2007), I’d love to see him mount “The Given Day” as a mini-series.
World Gone By is a brutal epilogue to Live By Night
Warner Bros. Pictures
With Danny’s story complete in “The Given Day,” “Live By Night” shifts to Joe. It’s Lehane doing his own “The Godfather,” with the same themes of American capitalism as legitimized gangsterism. The detours to pre-revolution Cuba even echo “The Godfather Part II.” Unlike “The Godfather,” though, the romance outweighs the cynicism. The book has too much fun with Joe’s caper. Even him losing Graciela feels trite; another woman in a fridge. The trilogy capper rectified that.
“World Gone By” is “The Death of Joe Coughlin,” to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola’s preferred title for “Godfather 3.” It’s a bleak book where the universe laughs at Joe even thinking of redemption. Joe learns his right hand Dion (Chris Messina in Affleck’s movie) is a rat and must execute him Fredo-style. The chapter ends with Joe seeing his son Tomás watching the murder and becoming “lost to him forever.”
As if that wasn’t cruel enough, Joe himself is gunned down on the final pages. Lehane has written many characters worthy of damnation, and he gives a peek at what their eternity looks like:
“[Joe] waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.”
It’s one of the greatest and most mournful gangster story endings, on par with Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) last conversation with a senile Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) in the “Sopranos” finale “Made in America” or Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) sitting alone, forgotten, with a door creaked open slightly at the end of “The Irishman.” If Affleck’s “Live by Night” had ended that way, maybe I’d still think about it like I do “World Gone By.”
