Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Live by Night Blu-ray Movie Review

The Reluctant Mobster

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 21, 2017

Live by Night is the fourth film directed by Ben Affleck, who is returning to the same literary well from which he drew his debut feature, Gone Baby Gone. Affleck's latest is an adaptation of an award-winning novel of the same name by author Dennis Lahane, chronicling the Prohibition-era rise and fall of a small-time stickup man who ends up presiding over a bootlegging empire. The actor/writer/director's gangster saga aspires to the same epic territory staked out by Coppola, Leone, Scorsese and De Palma, but despite being handsomely mounted and elegantly shot, the film never gets off the ground.

Joe Coughlin (Affleck), a first-generation Irish-American, returns to his native Boston from the trenches of World War I, disillusioned and determined to live by his own rules. Eschewing loyalty to either of the city's feuding crime bosses—the Irish Albert White (Robert Glenister) and the Italian Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone)—Coughlin manages by pulling low-level heists, until he makes the mistake of falling in love with Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), a tough floozy who definitely does not have a heart of gold. She is also, inconveniently, the mistress of boss Albert White. A bank robbery intended to fund a new start with Emma goes horribly wrong, and Coughlin is betrayed, targeted by White and captured by the police.

After a stint in prison, Coughlin emerges with a new willingness to work for Pescatore so that he can seek revenge. Since White has now relocated to Miami, Coughlin jumps at the chance to assume control of the Pescatores' Tampa-based bootlegging operation. With the help of loyal lieutenant Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), Coughlin becomes West Florida's criminal kingpin, assisted by a tacit "hands off" agreement with the local police chief, Figgis (Chris Cooper). Along the way, he falls in love with Graciela (Zoe Saldana), sister of the head of a Cuban syndicate. When his efforts to expand the Pescatore interests into gambling hit an unexpected snag, Coughlin finds himself once again caught between the Pescatore family and Albert White, leading to a showdown and a final reckoning.

Affleck deploys all the resources at a modern filmmaker's command to evoke a bygone era. (The re-creation of Ybor City, described by one character as "the Harlem of Tampa", is particularly impressive.) He stages several memorable set pieces, including a car chase after Coughlin's bank robbery and a shootout in a Tampa hotel with a body count rivaling the conclusion of De Palma's Scarface. The supporting performances are uniformly excellent, including, besides those already mentioned, Brendan Gleeson as Coughlin's censorious father and Elle Fanning as the daughter of Chris Cooper's police chief, who falls into drugs and prostitution when she ventures out to Hollywood and returns as a crusading revivalist preaching against gambling. Cinematographer Robert Richardson's lighting is moody and expressive, and the editing by William Goldenberg, who won an Oscar for his work on Affleck's Argo, is precise, sharp and efficient.

So why, with all these advantages, does Live by Night remain such a flat and uninvolving experience? Why does it feel like a meandering series of vignettes? The answer lies with Affleck's Coughlin, who is the dramatic center around which the story should coalesce, ebbing and flowing with the passions, compromises and moral quandaries that the would-be outsider encounters as events drag him inexorably into obligations and conflicts he'd rather avoid. It's a demanding role requiring a combination of movie star charisma and powerhouse acting, much like what Al Pacino brought to the Godfather trilogy and Robert De Niro displayed throughout Once Upon a Time in America. Affleck is certainly capable of the same level of performance; he managed something like it in The Town, but that crime thriller was confined to a single place and a short time frame, whereas Live by Night requires the central character to anchor the narrative on an expansive canvas involving multiple locales and a decade of changes in circumstance.

With Affleck doing quadruple duty as director, writer, producer and star, the acting gets short shrift. His portrayal reduces Coughlin to a one-note character, registering the same tepid level of emotion whether he's falling in love, fighting off an attacker or hatching a plan to outwit his adversaries. It's a surprise whenever Coughlin displays any degree of cunning, because Affleck never lets you see him thinking, relying on voiceover narration to fill in the blanks in his performance. The supporting players, especially Cooper, Girone and a standout Messina, give Affleck's Coughlin an array of emotional possibilities to which he can react, but he's like a black hole, absorbing all the energy around him and giving back nothing. With a cipher at its center, Live by Night never becomes a drama. It's more like a criminal bio-pic about a crook who's not particularly interesting.

Live by Night Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Live by Night was shot by three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson (J.F.K., The Aviator and Hugo) on the Alexa 65 with Panavision Vintage 65 anamorphic lenses. If IMDb is to be believed, the film was completed on a 4K digital intermediate. (As a nod to cinema's analog history, the opening Warner logo is set against a background that has been deliberately "distressed" to look like a worn film print.) Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray captures this combination of digital clarity and moody period lighting with precision and immediacy. The image is sharply detailed, allowing full appreciation of the film's meticulously crafted period costumes and decor. Blacks are solid and deep, which is essential for Richardson's artfully arranged shadows, recalling both film noir and Warner's classic gangster pictures of the Thirties. The opening Boston scenes are dominated by somber blues, browns and grays, while the Florida sequences lighten the palette and expand it with expanses of red and green and numerous whites and beiges. While the usual cinematic approach to invoking the past is to soften the image and cast a sepia-toned haze over everything, Live by Night take the opposite tack, reproducing its historical tableaus with "you are there" vividness.

Warner has mastered Live by Night with an average bitrate of 24.99 Mbps, and for once the studio's theatrical group can't be accused of wasting space on the BD-50, which is filled to near-capacity with the 129-minute film, the extras in HD and multiple language tracks. The encoding is capable, and the image is free of artifacts.

Live by Night Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Live by Night arrives with a choice between Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD MA 5.1, although it's hard to understand what the latter adds to the Atmos track's Dolby TrueHD 7.1 "core". In any case, the Atmos track is excellent, subtly differentiating between the urban Boston setting and the more expansive environments of the Florida scenes, including the Caribbean atmosphere of Tampa's Ybor City. For the film's big set pieces (the bank robbery car chase, the climactic shootout), the Atmos track supplies a melange of antique machinery, weapons fire, bullet hits and shell casings being ejected, and the format's ability to place discrete effects at specific points throughout the listening space is used to full advantage. The dialogue is clearly reproduced and well-prioritized, and the score by Henry Gregson-Williams (The Equalizer) shifts fluidly among action, romance and thriller beats.

Live by Night Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director Ben Affleck, Director of Photography Robert Richardson and Production Designer Jess Gonchor: Though billed as a "director's commentary", Affleck's two collaborators participate continuously, lending the track the spontaneous tone of an informal conversation. The discussion is largely technical, as the participants distinguish among locations, sets and green-screen add-ons; discuss lighting challenges and the use of digital effects to re-create the past; and, in Affleck's case, point out places where the film changed during editing. Recorded in January 2017, when Live by Night had already failed at the box office, the commentators remain proud of their work, and Affleck says it's his favorite among his directorial efforts.



• Angels with Dirty Faces: The Women of Live by Night (1080p; 1.78:1; 8:54): Affleck, author Dennis Lehane and the three lead actresses discuss the film's female characters, each of which is meant to reveal a different side of Joe Coughlin.



• The Men of Live by Night (1080p; 1.78:1; 8:30): This featurette includes interviews with Affleck, Messina ("Dion"), Gleeson ("Thomas Coughlin"), Cooper ("Chief Figgis"), Girone ("Maso Pescatore") and Glenister ("Albert White").



• Live by Night's Prolific Author (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:53): Dennis Lehane discusses his inspiration for the novel and the experience of being adapted for the screen.



• In Close-Up: Creating a Classic Car Chase (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:35): Affleck, DP Richardson, editor Goldenberg, stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell and composer Gregson-Williams discuss the challenges of creating a chase sequence that gives the audience something new.



• Deleted Scenes (w/Optional Commentary) (1080p; 2.40:1; 15:36): The five scenes cannot be selected separately, but each is introduced by a title card. Affleck's commentary explains why each scene was removed. The longest is the alternate opening showing how Coughlin's relationship with Emma began. Of particular note is the scene in which Coughlin briefly reunites with his brother who works in Hollywood, played by Scott Eastwood; in the finished film, he is referenced but never appears.


• ALT "Meeting Emma" Opening
• Shoelace Tim Hickey / Last Termite
• Joe and Danny Reunite
• Joe and Esteban talk about Graciela's husband
• Joe and Graciela walk through Tent City



• Introductory Trailers: At startup, the disc plays a trailer for Kong: Skull Island and a PSA on the risks of smoking.

Live by Night Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Live by Night is such a beautiful Blu-ray that some may decide to acquire it for its technical superiority, overlooking the film's deficiencies. Its visuals would have been even better represented in 4K, but Warner canceled a planned UHD release, which seems inconsistent with the studio's granting of such treatment to Pan, Point Break and In the Heart of the Sea, all of which were box office bombs with 2K sources that stand to benefit far less from UHD treatment. Fans and the curious will have to content themselves with the Blu-ray, but at least it's among the best that Warner's theatrical group has produced in recent years. On its technical merits, the disc is recommended. The film itself is a misfire.