This Ben Affleck crime thriller adapted the second in a trilogy of books

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2016 was not Ben Affleck’s year: he starred in three films, and none were a success. His performance as Batman in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” was praised, but the film itself was praised. not, marking the beginning of the end for the DC Extended Universe. Affleck’s original action thriller, “The Accountant,” also received mediocre 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 empire in Florida and falls in love with Cuban criminal Graciela Corrales (Zoe Saldaña). Affleck directed the film and (mistakenly) introduced himself as 20-year-old Joe. Since his last project was Best Picture winner “Argo,” you’d think he’d be up to it again. It should not be: “Live By Night” bombed and became Affleck’s first failure as a director.

“Live By Night” is based on a 2012 novel by Dennis Lehanewho (like Affleck) is from Boston. The source material has a larger story behind it; “Live by Night” is the second novel in a trilogy that follows the Coughlin family in the early 20th century. (However Lehane prefers to think about books as “three autonomous entities linked by a lineage”.)

Affleck made his directorial debut adapting “Gone Baby Gone” by Lehane the fourth volume of the Kenzie & Gennaro detective series. It worked, so why didn’t “Live by Night” work? Having read all of Lehane’s books, this writer feels that “Live by Night” is both one of his minor works and the weak point of Coughlin’s trilogy. Still, reading “Live by Night” is better than watching it, especially since the Coughlin trilogy begins and ends with triumphs.

Lehane has made a career writing procedurals and thrillers, but with “The Given Day” from 2008 he wrote something more literary. A tome of more than 700 pages, “The Given Day” is set primarily in Boston in the late 1910s, immediately after the end of World War I. The narrative is shared 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, a member of law enforcement, was involved in organizing the work of Boston patrol officers and participated in the historic Boston police strike of 1919.

Writing crime novels taught Lehane how to weave complex story threads. He used those skills in “The Given Day” to write a sprawling family drama without abandoning his clever dialogue. One sentence that has stuck with me is the one where Danny reflects on the fact that anti-capitalists fail to understand the human drive:

“[Communists are] pursuing a utopia that does not take into account the most basic characteristic of the human animal: lust. THE [Bolsheviks] believed it could be cured like a disease, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and that removing it would kill the host.

“The Given Day” remains Lehane’s most ambitious novel in terms of historical research and storytelling. It’s also his best; only “Mystic River” comes close.

Lehane also works in television; he wrote for “The Wire” and developed the Apple TV miniseries “Black Bird” and “Smoke.” Although he said he wasn’t comfortable adapting his books into screenplays (Lehane described it as having to “operate on my child” to the Massachusetts newspaper the Patriot Ledger in 2007), I would love to see him edit “The Given Day” as a miniseries.

With Danny’s story finished in “The Given Day”, “Live By Night” shifts to Joe. It’s Lehane who makes his own “The Godfather”, with the same themes of American capitalism as legitimized gangsterism. The detours to pre-revolution Cuba even echo “The Godfather II.” Unlike “The Godfather,” however, the romance trumps the cynicism. The book has too much fun with Joe’s capers. Even him, losing Graciela seems trivial; another woman in a fridge. The trilogy capper rectified that.

“The Vanished World” is “The Death of Joe Coughlin”, to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola’s favorite title for “The Godfather 3”. It’s a dark book where the universe mocks Joe for even thinking about redemption. Joe learns that his right-hand man, Dion (Chris Messina in Affleck’s film) is a rat and must execute him Fredo-style. The chapter ends with Joe seeing his son Tomás witness the murder and becoming “lost to him forever”.

As if that wasn’t cruel enough, Joe himself is shot dead in the final pages. Lehane has written many characters worthy of damnation, and he provides insight into what their eternity looks like:

“[Joe] I waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was something other than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never reached the shore. »

It’s one of the greatest, saddest gangster story endings, on par with Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) final conversation with a senile Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) in the “Sopranos” finale “Made in America” ​​or with Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) sitting alone, forgotten, with a door slightly open at the end of “The Irishman.” If Affleck’s “Live by Night” had ended this way, maybe I’d still think about it the way I do “World Gone By.”