★★★
(MA), 129 minutes
Dennis Lehane must drive Boston's tourism authorities to distraction. Four of his books have been filmed, plus one short story, and they all dwell on his hometown's mean streets, where crime and corruption are tearing up the neighbourhood.
Lehane's novel, Live by Night – now a film directed by Ben Affleck – is set in Prohibition-era Boston, plunging us straight into a gangland war between the Italians and the Irish. Affleck's Joe Coughlin, a traditional American anti-hero directly descended from the Bogart and Cagney breeds who populated early Warner Brothers' crime movies, is caught right in the middle of it. Having taken up a career as a small-time robber and bootlegger after returning disillusioned from the trenches of World War I, he styles himself as an outlaw rather than a gangster. He even imagines he can take care of business without having to kill anybody.
He's proved, however, a little too efficient for his own good. The Irish and the Italians both want him to work for them. And adding an extra dose of volatility to the mix, there's his illicit love affair with Emma (Sienna Miller), who happens to be the girlfriend of the Irish mob boss, played as a comic-book villain by British actor Robert Glenister.
Lehane has written three books about the Coughlin family. The first, The Given Day, concentrates on the adventures of Joe's older brother, Daniel, and their violently overbearing father, Thomas, the Boston police department's deputy chief superintendent. In this instalment, Danny is out of the action, having moved to California, but Thomas remains a formidable presence, thanks to the casting of Brendan Gleeson, who is as potent as ever, investing the part with a judicious combination of moral authority and quiet menace.
He and Miller have just one scene together. He condescends and insults, and she snaps back with a febrile energy that makes it one of the most memorable scenes in the movie. Then partway in, the story takes a radical – and for Lehane – unprecedented turn. We leave his Boston behind for the sunny but equally crime-ridden streets of Florida.
This means abandoning two of the main characters and beginning a new chapter – the kind of narrative ploy that screen writing courses abhor. Yet there are enough clues to lead you to suspect the structure is going to hold and come full circle in the end. So, confronted with an offer he can't refuse, Joe goes south to run the Italian mob's bootlegging operations in Tampa. He also meets a new woman, Graciela (Zoe Saldana), a Cuban. The scene abruptly changes from the glittering monochrome of dark, rainy streets and smoky speakeasies to one of pastels, palm trees and panama hats. And, arrayed in tropical rig, the famously big and broad-shouldered Affleck gamely faces up to the risk of looking like a slab of cream stucco.
It's far from a standout performance from Affleck. While his first-person voice-over imbues Joe with a measure of rueful introspection, he's a highly romanticised figure and he's not exactly demonstrative. Phlegmatism is his default position. Yet he's likeable enough to keep you onside – despite the corpses piling up around him as he rapidly comes round to the conviction that self-preservation can't be guaranteed without a gun – or preferably, an armoury of them.
The density, scope and ingenuity of Lehane's plotting, however, means the script never degenerates into the kind of film in which character and dialogue are no more than flimsy bridges between the car chases and shootouts. Crime and social history are intertwined as Joe comes up against racial and social prejudice, the Klu Klux Klan and a young evangelist (Elle Fanning) modelled in part on the preacher, Aimee Semple McPherson. It's a sprawling story packed with character and incident, and while at least one of the big surprises is telegraphed in advance, there's none of the weary predictability to be found in more conventional crime movies.
It's not Goodfellas. It lacks the black humour and the relish for eccentricity for its own sake, and the ending verges on mawkishness. But it's great entertainment – a cunningly wrought tribute to old-fashioned Hollywood and the Warners style.