In Which The Era Of The Racially Progressively Gangster Passes

The Bloat

by ELEANOR MORROW

Live by Night
dir. Ben Affleck
129 minutes

Once you notice one major flaw in a friend, the rest generally come tumbling out. I knew a guy several years ago who made all his girlfriends get the exact same haircut. It was sort of like the haircut that Rachel got on Friends but with a touch of wretched abandon to it. None of the women involved presumably saw pictures of their forebears, and he did the styling himself. That same sort of creepy feeling radiates off Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck).

Besides this fatal flaw, Coughlin is also a murderer and thief. Besides those other two fatal flaws, he is a prince of a fellow. The thing he hates most is racism, and he is always fighting it, even though it is not even World War II yet and most of the people he meets in the progressive paradise of, ahem, Ybor City, Florida, also live very progressive lives.

After his first relationship falls apart, Mr. Coughlin brings two key people into his life. One is Mindy Lahiri's ex-boyfriend Danny (Chris Messina), who makes Affleck look like a handsome giant in comparison.

Coughlin's other friend is the Cuban alcohol smuggler who becomes his wife, Graciela (Zoe Saldana). She has the exact same haircut, as I mentioned, of the last woman he was in love with, but I would not spend too much time thinking about what these two people have in common. She is falling all over him with the sex — isn't Batman attractive? you will hopefully be thinking to yourself.

That is when I began to realize Live by Night was just an extended apologia/rehabilitation created by Affleck to make him look attractive to other women, since whenever the paparazzi insist on taking photos of him he looks more bloated than end-stage Marlon Brando. Ben was clearly disappointed that he looked like Chunk from The Goonies during the lengthy running time of Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

In Live by Night, Affleck dresses himself up in these amazing suits that do the service of making him seem svelte by virtue of old fashioned lines and tailoring that diminishes the weight he carries in his hips. The women of Live by Night are also completely hidden by swaths of clothes and fabric, indicating that this must be merely the custom of the time.

Affleck's character kills a bunch of police officers. He never shows any remorse for what he's done. Since his father (Brendan Gleeson) is the police captain, he gets off with a very light prison sentence. Coughlin heads right back on the streets looking for revenge on the Irish boss who betrayed him for schtupping his girlfriend (Sienna Miller, whose head is now a perfect circle).

For some reason Coughlin's plan is to offer his services to the Italian mafia. He asks the Boston-based boss of the family if he has trouble with an Irishman working for him, and the guy is like, no not at all. The important thing to know is that these men may be vicious killers, but they have avoided a far worse fate — being indicted on charges of bigotry or racial preference.

What a world. Coughlin agrees to go to Florida, and Affleck turns Live by Night into a buddy comedy for a bit. Affleck has never had much talent behind or in front of the camera, but sticking to Dennis Lehane's basic novel means he can get the pacing down all right. He tries to turn every plot he works with into a thriller, which is really not what Live by Night is meant to be. The events themselves aren't much — the entire program depends on investments in the characters, which Affleck flattens by making them seem like caricatures from other, better mob movies.

Because of his interracial marriage, the local Ku Klux Klan starts going after Joe Coughlin in a major way. He fails as a mobster since he won't expand his business to the drug trade after Prohibition ends. You see, Joe's moral compass permits the taking of human life, but not the enjoyment of the same.

Somewhere in here Elle Fanning shows up. Like all the women in Live by Night, she has no actual agency of her own and exists in the plot merely as a functionary whose death serves to propel various events forwards. No woman should probably ever agree to work with Mr. Affleck again based on these results.

Maybe a better performer like Joaquin Phoenix or (producer on this disaster) Leonardo DiCaprio could have carried Live by Night to something close to watchability, but Affleck plays Coughlin as an overserious lug — we never get the sense he is capable of the insight the lugubrious voiceover attributes to him. Moreover, Affleck's lower body and hands never seem to move at all, meaning Joe Coughlin might as well be a talking head ping-ponging through cinematic space.

Affleck's worst trait as a director is his prosaic and overly symbolic use of light. The way he puts all the morally dubious characters in darkness, obscuring the actual abilities of the talented performers in this ensemble is extremely distracting and counterproductive to our basic enjoyment of the story. Just go back to The Batman and leave these poor actors alone.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which The Neon Demon Locks Herself Away

Ryan? Ryan?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Neon Demon
dir. Nicolas Winding Refn
117 minutes

It is difficult, so difficult to find something nice to say about The Neon Demon. There is one scene where a cougar tears up the hotel room of Jesse (Elle Fanning) and it's obvious the two have the same eyebrows. Jesse looks nothing like a model, and it is honestly hard to believe that she is one. Everyone asks her how old she is in Los Angeles. When Robert (Alessandro Nivola) sees her for the first time, he looks like he is having a spiritual experience. 

None of Winding Refn's previous films were enjoyable on a story level either, but Ryan Gosling is so compulsively watchable that he was able to salvage a lot of what made them sort of actually dull. Here there is no Gosling to be found, which is kind of sad since he would be fantastic in pretty much every male role currently occupied by a vague Gosling lookalikes:

Alessandro Nivola is old, married Gosling

Desmond Harrington is a divorced Gosling

Karl Glusman is a Jewish Gosling

Keanu Reeves is a decrepit Gosling

As a photographer's assistant Jena Malone is by far the most entertaining part of The Neon Demon — she appears to become what Jesse might become, and her dry humping was on point. Malone has been an impressively subtle film actress since she drove Julia Roberts crazy as a preteen in Stepmom, and The Neon Demon is only worth watching when she occupies the screen.

Malone is the cipher for the more violent aspects of The Neon Demon, which don't really come into play until the film's third act. Everyone in Jesse's world becomes more and more envious of her, and the sensation that she is going to meet a grisly fate becomes relatively overpowering. "My mother said I was dangerous," she explains to Malone, who cannot even believe that the thing she most desires is talking.

Viewing The Neon Demon made me want to watch Stepmom just so I could believe human beings had a soul again. There is this scene where Ed Harris tells his wife that he is getting married again, and she asks him, "What makes you think it is going to work this time?" and he just sits there and doesn't make a sound. 

Perhaps knowing how boring this movie is, Refn moves things along at a fairly rapid pace. Jesse nabs some various roles and the men and women that surround her become very jealous. One of them basically asks her what it's like to be the sun, and she says, "It's everything."

At one point it actually seems like Refn might have some fun, and Jesse closes out a fashion show as electronic music more positively. Things go downhill quickly from there, since there seems to be an underlying point that modeling is akin to human trafficking.

As always, Refn's lightning is the strongest aspect of his composition. He is never focused on making Jesse beautiful, which would be impossible, and instead strips her of everything: gender, identity, personality. It's almost a surprise that her hair never gets cut off in The Neon Demon. Instead she is merely transformed into a more exaggerated version of herself that cannot help but be more appealing to those around her.

The Neon Demon probably would have been a lot more enjoyable as a silent film, and it disappointing that Refn backed off this approach after seeing how unfriendly it was to audiences in his last project, Only God Forgives. "True beauty is the highest currency we have," espouses Nivola at one point, and this is about the general emotional depth of this project, which probably would have been on the cutting edge in the late 1930s. 

Maybe The Neon Demon is intentionally bad, like an act of self sabotage? At that point the tremulously poor dialogue would start to make the slightest bit of sense. Keanu Reeves plays the manager of the motel that Jesse lives at, and his mock-threatening attitude towards women and young people is the only evidence of self-awareness in this turgid shitshow. He puts a knife down Jesse's throat, and we are kind of sad this is only someone else's dream.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.