🎬 Cinéma-Bon: Live By Night - Book Vs. Movie
Was this really a stumble by Affleck, or did this movie just get lost in the shuffle?
Honestly, I don’t know any French, but “Good Movie” comes up when you put this column’s title in Google Translate.
…and “Bonne” can also mean a maid. At the height of our horniness, we could envision someone (any gender!) in a “French Maid” outfit in a movie like Bachelor Party, but really, the logo is what’s driving this post. Oh, and the book! and the movie! of course! those things!
Speaking of the logo, though. I didn’t want to spend, like, too much time on it, but I had to resort to an online service to make the “wave”. I thought this could be done in Photoshop, but I was wrong. I frequently upload my images to these kinds of sites for the functions I need. These types of sites are either open-source for the community or are stealing all of my passwords. Oh, well. I guess someone else can use my $9.99 a month I pay Adobe if they find the password. That’s fair game.
… the “THAT’S JUST LAZY WRITING” subtitle in the design refers to me, the world’s laziest writer, not the particular movie or the book being reviewed.
Moving on, we are here to talk about the book, and the movie, Live By Night. The book was published in 2012 by Dennis Lehane, the second in the Coughlin series of books. I read Book One, The Given Day last year for two reasons of great interest.
The first is that the book takes place in part in my neighborhood, Brighton MA. They speak of the stockyard in Brighton and an old hotel that is where my barber Matt is now.
The second reason, as it was recommended to me in Audible, was this was another “Pandemic of 1918” genre of book. I’ve spent much of the quarantine binging books about the pandemic of 100 years ago. I had a picture in my mind of this Joe Coughlin, a young boy in The Given Day and enough backstory with his father to wanted to move on to the next in the trilogy, having no idea that Live By Night the movie had anything to do with this. In fact, I didn’t know it was a trilogy at all. I will be looking forward to digging into World Gone By, Book 3, very soon.
I was always very curious about Live By Night the movie but somehow avoided seeing it, even though it was available to me on HBO at some point in the hazy fog of the last four years.
I finally came around to the movie Argo after talking with my friend Jerry about his involvement with Wired and developing the art that the movie was based on. I really enjoyed Argo the second time through. Two stars of my favorite TV show Halt and Catch Fire (Kerry Bishe and Scoot McNairy) were also in Argo together as husband and wife. Not sure why this movie didn’t stick the first time, but with Jack Kirby's drawings and a compelling and true story, I really dug it.
I have to admit, I do like Ben Affleck as an artist, a director, as an actor, as a Batman. We’re similar in age and let’s be honest, there is not much difference between him and me really! He just got to play Batman! Just kidding, of course, but I am a fan. I even enjoy his Daredevil which was created in the time when comic book movies tried to be good but had difficulty rising above. I like that movie because I remember a time when new comic book adaptations were rare, not a weekly occurrence!
Slaine, Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, and Owen Burke in The Town. Copyright Warner Bros.
The Town is also a really great film with Jon Hamm, Slaine, and Hawkeye in it. Oh, and Rebecca Hall from that Godzilla vs Kong movie that I know you watched! Shootout at the McDonald’s on Boylston St., amiright?
As arduous a task it was for me to deliver a 6-part #SnyderCut review, I had been planning on this one for Live By Night for a while. I tend not to read other reviews when making my own, but I had to make an exception this time.
There are not a lot of fan YouTube videos comparing the book to the movie (zero), and frankly not even a lot of reviews out there doing so. I think it is an interesting way to look at this movie, and encourage those that like stories like Boardwalk Empire, Prohibition gangster stories like Godfather to head on down to Ybor City (a suburb of Miami) for this one.
Well researched shows like Boardwalk Empire and Lehane with his own research lays out a timeline of key events during Prohibition and even introduce the same real-life characters like "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and more.
There are a lot of good stories to tell about those notorious rum-runners.
I was about halfway through the book when I decided to watch Live By Night with the director’s commentary on it. Good insight into the production. Lehane and Affleck worked together for his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone (2007), another favorite of mine. I’m kind of a sucker for all these hometown movies, you know? I can’t help it.
Affleck tries to be faithful to the book, but we all should understand now that faithfulness to the text has some downfalls. Directors are accused of fan service and more. I think the changes to the book really work for the film, and I can justify two big ones off the top. The main one, perhaps more important, is that Joe Coughlin (Affleck) is a lot older than he would be in the book trilogy timeline.
He did this so that he could play the character, and honestly, I think it’s an alright call. This can’t be the reason that the movie bombed at the box office. He was great in this. He plays a kind of understated, a “Mick” Irish gangst-ah with an accurate Boston accent. His fury and resentment, like all good repressed Bostonians, is boiling inside.
To compare with the book, Affleck would sort of swap ages with his older brother, Aiden "Danny" Coughlin. Some scenes with a younger Aiden portrayed by Scott Eastwood were cut from the film for clarity. It wasn’t needed, but I would certainly watch a The Given Day film with Scott!
Another big change from the movie to the film was the time Joe spent in Charlestown State Prison. Affleck says it’s about 80 pages of the book spent in the prison, but he took what he could, introduced key prison allies and characters in other ways in the film, and made it all work. No problem here with this change or any of them.
Some dialogue is so good, and I think Lehane is just such a master, that the dialogue remains in the script and hardly changed at all. One would think there would be more of this, but some scenes you could practically read along with the book.
I may actually agree with Dave Sims at The Atlantic, “Live by Night might have been more suited to a blown-out television miniseries.”
Brian Tallarico’s Two-Star review at Roger Ebert asks … “So, the key question behind “Live by Night” isn’t so much “Why did they bother?” as “What went wrong?”
I might counter those arguments with, did this movie just hit at a bad time? A Christmas release “that election year”? Did Patriot’s Day steal the hometown market? Passengers? Rogue One: A Star Wars Story? (OK, but def give it up for Rogue One for sure - GOAT!)
Robert Richardson and Ben Affleck Behind The Scenes of Live By Night
Did the end of Boardwalk Empire in 2014 signal the end for these kinds of stories? How did production on the Snyder-verse with Batman V Superman hamper Live By Night? Were Affleck’s alcoholism and addiction getting in the way of his directorial and performance?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but as a fan of sorta-long, sorta-slow genre movies, I don’t think Ben Affleck has anything to be ashamed of here. The cast is amazing, I mean look at (some of) them!
Ben Affleck as Joe Coughlin
Elle Fanning as Loretta Figgis
Brendan Gleeson as Thomas Coughlin
Chris Messina as Dion Bartolo
Sienna Miller as Emma Gould
Zoe Saldana as Graciela Corrales
Clark Gregg as Calvin Bondurant
Anthony Michael Hall as Gary L. Smith
Visually, cinematographer Robert Richardson fucking nails it like he always does (JFK, The Aviator, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight…) and it’s fun to go from North End tenements to the tropical vistas of Miami. Classic cars, cool costumes, speakeasies, corrupt cops. It all looks great!
The movie was shot in parts in Lawrence, MA, in Los Angeles, Georgia, and The North End of Boston. Initial production was delayed a bit for Affleck to act in Gone Girl and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
From Wikipedia: Mike Ryan of Uproxx gave the film a mixed review, and noted that it felt rushed to completion, saying, "I am a fan of the movies Ben Affleck has directed. That's why Live by Night is such a disappointment. I was actively looking forward to it. And I would have given it any benefit of the doubt, but this movie just isn't there. It feels like a rushed project that Affleck had to get out of the way before he plays Batman again."
I’m not sure I 100% agree with Mike, I guess I’ll try to call Ben on the Batphone to see if that rings true for him.
I think this is just a specific kind of movie that came out at the wrong time for commercial success. “The film lost around $75 million” (Wiki)
“Fair Enough” is what I say when people like my accountant try to explain “numbers” to me and I really don’t understand. So “Fair Enough”.
If this movie were released now, with the new HBO Max thing with the release on demand as well as in theatres, would more people have seen it and chimed in?
How can we save Live By Night so that this one-man content farm can have a follow-up article about the third Coughlin book and movie!
Is it a better book than a movie? Of course, it is. Name one film better than the word pictures that you create yourself. Is the movie bad? Hell no! It’s awesome. It just might not be the kind of movie you like to watch, and that’s OK.
There are some small moments, specifically at the end of the book that delve deeper into Joe’s relationship with his brother, Danny. The changes are superficial, and if you read the book before seeing the movie, you get a couple of nice Easter Eggs, but as with many differences, these moments are neither noticeable nor necessary.
Some parts of Danny are incorporated into Joe’s story to flesh him out a bit, and that’s fine with me. In the movie universe, Danny still has an interesting storyline of moving to Hollywood to be a stuntman and write for “The Shows, The Pictures, The Talkies”!
Apparently, Affleck (also the screenwriter, did I mention that?) asked Lehane if it was OK if he aged Joe up to play the part. Considering that Lehane does not use a middle-man for his movie deals, he must have approved in the end!
I quite liked Live By Night and will be convincing my girlfriend (a huge Boardwalk Empire fan) to watch it someday. (She falls asleep during movies)!
Brighton MA Stockyard Fire 1912
On the extras, a brief interview with Dennis Lehane was a highlight for me. Just as The Given Day also dealt with race, baseball, and the slaughterhouse that sits on the same spot I go to eat steak on my birthday, he points out how to spot the bad guy in his books.
It’s always the racist.
RD Pruitt played by Matthew Maher is perfect for this part of the Southern Klansman in the movie. Pitch perfect to the book’s descriptors. “I don’t shake hands with papists”, followed by a “just kidding” and a sly snicker laugh makes you want to strangle the guy. Later on, he follows with “yeah, I took his Catholic money”. I’m not religious enough to know why this guy hates black people and Catholics as much as he hates Joe Coughlin, but here we are.
Tying the books together, and not so much the movie, is a theme of baseball. The Given Day has this great connection to the Negro Leagues and Babe Ruth. More classic Boston stuff I’m a sucker for. The Live By Night book concludes with more baseball in a cute way and sets up what Joe Coughlin’s life will look like in World Gone By.
The Negro Leagues were recognized 100 years too late in 2020.
I can’t influence the studio or anyone else to option World Gone By just so I can have a sequel in the Coughlin-verse after such a box-office flop, but I can recommend this movie. Put it on the list for a lazy Sunday, mix a mojito, and keep an eye out for the bad guys, the racists.
FYI, I think the racist guy that lives next door to me just moved out.
I’ve forced my cohorts at LeaguePodcast to rate movies like school papers when they like BLANK out of 10 stars. They are probably right to stick with a more recognizable rating system but here are FACTS (of opinions)!
Rotten Tomatoes: 35% critic score (Youch!) vs 42% audience score (oof!)
Roger Ebert: 2 stars (wow!)
IMDB: 6.4/10 (pulls collar)
Reelviews: 3 Out of 4 Stars (now we’re getting somewhere)
Cinéma-Bon: Book Score A+
Cinéma-Bon: Movie Score A-
Overall Cinéma-Bon Score:
