Review: "Live By Night"

“Live By Night” is Ben Affleck’s conscious attempt to recreate the look and feel of an Old Hollywood crime drama with a modern frosting of sex and violence. It’s an overstuffed, messy narrative filled with a lot of terrific actors and strong scenes lacking connective tissue.

This movie is Full Boat Affleck: in addition to starring as a Boston Irish mobster transplanted to Tampa Bay to run their Prohibition Era operations, he also directs, produces and adapted the novel by Dennis Lehane.

All I can say is Affleck certainly knows how to shoot himself as a director, and how to shoot himself in the foot as a screenwriter.

Cary Grant himself would have to admit how dapper Affleck looks in this movie, his dark, chiseled features set off by 1920s costumes and backdrops. Robert Richardson’s photography recalls the best of the film noir tradition while employing diffuse colors and slanted light.

The story is… the sort of thing you get trying to cram a 400-page book into a two-hour movie. Though I haven’t read Lehane’s book, from what I’ve gathered it seems Affleck tried to follow the novel pretty closely, ejecting only a brief sojourn to Cuba. He would have done better to scale down the sheer number of secondary characters and tertiary plot lines.

Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a Boston police captain who went bad and became a thief. He runs into trouble when he romances the moll (Sienna Miller) of his boss, a pugnacious fellow named Albert White (Robert Glenister). A few hops and skips of the plot later, and after a stint in prison, Joe finds himself sent down to Ybor City, Fla., to take over the illicit liquor operations of his new Italian mob masters.

Joe and his partner, Dion (an excellent Chris Messina), soon put the locals on notice that there’s a new boss in town, offing some low-level hicks and even befriending the local sheriff (Chris Cooper), a deeply religious man who compartmentalizes his faith with the desire to keep the peace. Joe falls for a vivacious Cuban expat, Graciella (Zoe Saldana), and soon it seems like his snake-eyes luck is starting to change.

But challenges always abound, including pushback from a vicious local leader of the Klan (Matthew Maher), who just happens to be the sheriff’s kin. And the Italians up north aren’t satisfied that the booze business is booming, but want Joe to branch out into gambling, prostitution, drugs, etc. That means stepping on more toes in his new beachside paradise.

Elle Fanning plays the sheriff’s daughter, who gets used up in a bad way when she tries to make a go in showbiz, and returns to town preaching about the evils of men like Joe in a series of burgeoning tent revivals. One of the film’s main problems is that even though his character seems to be at the center of Joe’s thicket of problems, Chris Cooper doesn’t actually get a lot of screen time to flesh out his conflict.

We pretty much know where all this is heading, so it’s just a matter of drinking in the atmosphere and encounters before the movie winds up where it will. Lehane’s work tends to start in tragedy, then wander around a bit before returning home.

There are a lot of great puzzle pieces in “Live By Night,” but it feels like there’s too many and they don’t always fit together.

Review: "The Drop"

"The Drop" is an intriguing, atypical movie. It starts out with a lot of disparate characters and story elements, some of them related, much of it not. Over time they gradually float towards each other, each piece locking into place in a way that might not have seemed obvious at first.

The experience of watching it is like stumbling upon a disassembled pocket watch, and then witnessing the little gears and springs drag themselves, with almost gravitational pull, into a cohesive whole again. The actual process of putting itself back together can be a bit tedious at times, but at some point everything clicks together.

This is another film based on the writings of Dennis Lehane, who also penned the screenplay. Movies based on his work have been up ("Gone Baby Gone"), down ("Shutter Island") and vastly overhyped ("Mystic River"). Here is a film that seems to contain the Lehane mythos boiled down to its inky essence. The story happens almost entirely inside one seedy bar, and the few frozen city blocks around it.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saganowsky, who sloshes drinks at Cousin Marv's Bar. Bob speaks in a clinched little croak, almost whiny; he isn't terribly bright and is passive almost to the point of transparency. There are rough types who come into the bar, and some try to get a rise out of Bob, but they leave unsatisfied, because it's like kicking a sweet puppy who only comes back for more.
He is, in short, a mook.

Cousin Marv is mostly a figurehead these days, an aging hulk who barely moves from his corner table. His name's on the bar, and he used to run a little action on the side -- he was, he says, somebody who made people sit up when he walked in. But he got pushed by some tougher Chechen mobsters, and flinched, and now it's their bar and he just runs it.

James Gandolfini could play controlled rage better than just about anybody, so Marv is a fitting final screen role for him.

The title comes from the process of picking one bar at random to be the place where all the gambling and other dirty money winds up for the night -- "the safe for the entire city." It soon becomes clear that somebody's looking to hit Marv's the night it's the drop, and Bob gets caught up in the tide of events.

One night Bob is walking home from work and comes across a bloodied puppy dumped in a trash can. The woman who lives there, a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), helps him patch the dog up, but insists Bob adopt him as his own. He blanches at first, but finally takes on the little pitbull, whom he dubs Rocco. This is, for him, a major addition to his tiny universe, which essentially consists of just the bar and keeping up his dead parents' tidy brownstone.

Accepting the responsibility of the dog changes something in Bob ... or does it? Hardy's performance is one poker face behind another, so we're never quite sure what's going on the other side of that lunkhead mien. Dribs and drabs of information leak out to suggest there's more there. He and Nadia start seeing more of each other, hesitatingly -- it's like two wounded animals sniffing the other's wounds.

Other characters' orbits intersect with that of the bar. There's a perpetually smiling police detective (John Ortiz) who sees Bob at the same church every morning, and wonders why he never takes communion. He starts investigating a stick-up at the bar, and then noses into old crimes that have become part of the neighborhood lore.

There's Eric Deeds (an imposing Matthias Schoenaerts), a hustler with a past connected to Nadia. He casts a baleful eye at Bob for seemingly mysterious reasons, stopping by the bar or his house, claiming Rocco is actually his dog, and dropping idle threats. (Somehow, he makes an umbrella seem weapon-like.)

And then we have the Chechen boss, Chovka, chillingly played by Michael Aronov. He expects Marv and Bob to recover the money stolen during the robbery. You can see the wheels turn in Bob's head, slowly, and in Marv's head, slightly less slowly -- if they could find the money, wouldn't that imply they were in on the job?

Director Michaël R. Roskam takes his time -- too much, really -- building up the suspense, but the plot of "The Drop" eventually gets there.

Video review: "Shutter Island"

"Shutter Island" is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, accompanied by a relentlessly over-the-top musical score. We know from the get-go that the movie is playing mind games with us, and we don't need to have read the novel by Dennis Lehane to figure out pretty early on what the end game will be.

It's never a good thing when an audience knows where a story is going, and waits around for the film to catch up. Director Martin Scorsese and his cast pile on the atmospherics, the 1950s clothes and cars, so at least the waiting room is pleasant to look at.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in his third outing with Scorsese, plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Ashcliff, a prison for the criminally insane on a forbidding island in Boston Harbor.

Teddy's got a new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), with whom he quickly forms a hard-boiled bond. But nothing on the island is what it seems. Like an endless ball of yarn, the more of the mystery Chuck and Teddy unspool, the more confusing things continue to get.

They suspect the doctors are performing heartless experiments on the mentally ill. The prim head doctor (Ben Kingsley), is less than forthcoming with personnel files, and the patients have clearly been coached in their answers.

The music is omnipresent in the film, to the point of becoming comedic. When Chuck and Teddy first arrive at the facility's steel-and-brick compound, the score reaches an incredible volume of surging minor chords. They say film scores should be felt but not heard; this one not only intrudes into the foreground, it wants to be the life of the party.

"Shutter Island" feels like an exercise in mood manipulation. The film doesn't draw its audience in, but treats them like something to be experimented upon.

Video extras are rather measly -- the DVD version comes with nada.

Even the Blu-ray boasts only two bonus features: "Beyond the Shutters," a standard making-of documentary, and "Into the Lighthouse," a discussion of 1950s-era psychiatric therapies.

Movie: 2 stars
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "Shutter Island"

"Shutter Island" is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, accompanied by a relentlessly over-the-top musical score. We know from the get-go that the movie is playing mind games with us, and we don't need to have read the novel by Dennis Lehane to figure out pretty early on what the end game will be.

It's never a good thing when an audience knows where a story is going, and waits around for the film to catch up. Director Martin Scorsese and his cast pile on the atmospherics, the 1950s clothes and cars, so at least the waiting room is pleasant to look at.

Early in my career, I eschewed talking with other people who had seen the movie I'd just watched, worried about inadvertently plagiarizing. Lately I've taken to exchanging views with my fellow Indianapolis critics after a screening. We all know each other, so nobody's offended when there are disagreements. If someone says something brilliant, the others are polite enough to let him/her keep it without copycatting.

After "Shutter Island," a half-dozen of us sat around looking at each other, struggling to come up with anything to say. No one seemed blown away by the movie. Nobody really hated it, either. Joe Shearer enumerated some continuity errors that others had also noted but I hadn't, suggesting it was a deliberate attempt to comment on the characters' fractured state of mind.

About the only thing we all agreed on was that this is the sort of movie that requires several viewings to fully digest.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in his third outing with Scorsese, plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Ashcliff, a prison for the criminally insane on a forbidding island in Boston Harbor. The facility, nicknamed Shutter Island, is brimming with beefy security guards toting high-powered rifles, who eye Daniels warily as he disembarks from the ferry -- the only way on or off the island.

Teddy's got a new partner, Chuck, played by Mark Ruffalo. They quickly form a hard-boiled detective trust, although it's clear Teddy isn't telling Chuck everything. Over time, we get a few tidbits: An arsonist named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) who burned down an apartment building, killing Teddy's wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), is secretly being held at Ashcliff. In response to Chuck's worried looks, Teddy promises he's not there to kill Laeddis.

The facility is run by a prim doctor, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who is less than forthcoming with personnel files and other information necessary for the marshals' investigation. The staff is squirrely, and the patients have obviously been coached in their answers. The warden (Ted Levine) seems ready to engage Teddy in mortal combat at the drop of a hat.

Topping things off, one of the doctors appears to be an ex-Nazi -- which doesn't sit well with Teddy, who as a soldier helped liberate Dachau and saw first-hand the brutality there. (The doc is played by Max von Sydow, I guess with the notion that American audiences can't tell the difference between Swedish and German accents.)

Like an endless ball of yarn, the more of the mystery Teddy and Chuck unspool, the more confusing things continue to get. They suspect the doctors are performing heartless experiments on the mentally ill. A former patient, George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley), who after his release tipped Teddy off about the goings-on at Ashcliff, turns up in one of the dungeons, beaten to a pulp. Teddy's migraines, usually accompanied by visions of Dolores warning him about dangers ahead, grow more frequent.

I can't give away more, but by this point most audience members will have figured things out for themselves.

The music is omnipresent in the film, to the point of becoming comedic. When Chuck and Teddy first arrive at the facility's steel-and-brick compound, the score reaches an incredible volume of surging minor chords. I'm guessing Scorsese and music supervisor Robbie Robertson were going for something, but I confess I don't know what it is. They say film scores should be felt but not heard; this one not only intrudes into the foreground, it wants to be the life of the party.

"Shutter Island" is an expertly-made movie that left me at times exasperated, but occasionally intrigued. It feels like an exercise in mood manipulation, with the entire plot operating as a MacGuffin to set up scenes of squirm-inducing paranoia. This film doesn't draw its audience in, but treats them like something to be experimented upon.

2.5 stars