Live By Night

"Live by Night" - acclaimed director Ben Affleck's fourth film, adapted from a work of historical-fiction by literary award-magnet Dennis Lehane - is a beautifully-shot, remarkably-cast, trainwreck of a movie.

On paper, it's merely an ambitious mess: a gangster epic unfolding over two decades in the life of Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) - a former American soldier who vows to "stop kissing rings," but must compromise in order to rise through the ranks of the Italian Mafia and exact revenge on his hometown bully - loses himself in a rapidly-expanding illegal enterprise that must legitimize itself to survive. What begins as an objectivist-tinted indictment of tribalism, racism, cronyism, and nepotism, ultimately reveals the ouroboric nature of capitalism; it's a tall order for a single novel, let alone a single movie, and Affleck doesn't pull it off.

A slapped-on graphic menu adorning the Blu-ray belies a trove of genuinely fascinating special features. Among the load of extra material are two segments - one for the men, one for the women - that highlight a star-studded cast which includes Brendan Gleeson, Sienna Miller, Chris Messina, and many more. They're all good, but it's Messina (the cute guy from "The Mindy Project") who shines through. As Dion Bartolo, Coughlin's loyal lieutenant, Messina apparently followed the source material to the letter and took it upon himself to ugly it way up - he packed on forty pounds for the role, and sports a horrendous, thorny unibrow. By virtue of his character's proximity to Affleck, Messina gets the second-most amount of screen-time and easily holds his own, managing to be sympathetic, funny, and tough, sometimes all in one scene.

Affleck, on the other hand, not only miscast himself (he's at least ten years too old for the part, is spackled with make-up, and is inert on-screen like a gargantuan loaf of Wonder Bread that's a head taller and a foot wider than every one else), but uses his commentary track to apologize for the editing process that hacked what might have been a great twelve-episode mini-series and it into a single, sputtering 129 minute movie.

The buck stops with Affleck, and he knows it: "If I kept everything I wanted," he laments, "it would have been a seven-hour film." I might have liked to have seen it.

"Live By Night"
Blu-ray and Digital HD
$29.98
https://www.warnerbros.com/live-night