This is living?

Ben Affleck’s new movie is Live by Night, which he wrote (from Dennis Lehane’s novel), directed and stars in. It traces the career of Joe Coughlin (Affleck) from small-time Boston crook to the most successful Prohibition rum-runner in Florida. If you exclude the studio logos and the credits, every one of the movie’s 128 minutes reverberates with phoniness.

Here’s an example from the very last scene (spoiler-free). Coughlin sits in a movie theater watching a newsreel of Adolf Hitler and his goose-stepping legions. “Some little guy in Germany,” he tells us in voice-over, “was gettin’ people all excited. But they weren’t gonna go to war over him. No percentage in it.” Then the feature starts—a B-Western—and at the bottom of the screen it says, “Copyright MCMXLI.” That’s 1941—by which time the war Couglin says ain’t gonna happen had been raging for nearly two years. Affleck could have looked it up. Even Wikipedia gets it right.

Long before that, Live by Night has given your eye-rolling muscles a fine workout. Affleck’s antihero engages in an affair with Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), the mistress of Irish mob boss Albert White (Robert Glenister). White’s gangland rival Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) finds out and threatens to spill the beans unless Joe agrees to kill White. Joe refuses, Maso spills and Joe gets beaten to a pulp. He’s saved from death only because his father Tom (Brendan Gleeson), a high-ranking cop, arrests Joe for a bank robbery in which three cops were killed.

Daddy Tom blackmails the DA into letting Joe plead to a lesser charge. Joe gets out in three years and goes to work for Pescatore, winding up in Tampa overseeing that rum-running business. There he meets and falls for Graciela Suarez (Zoe Saldana), the sister of his Cuban molasses connection. (The supposedly life-changing Graciela actually gets little screen time, possibly to avoid overtaxing Saldana’s Cuban accent.)

In case you’ve lost count, we’re up to Gangster Movie Cliché No. 2,543. And I haven’t even mentioned the Florida sheriff (Chris Cooper) or his ex-hooker-former-junkie-evangelist daughter (Elle Fanning).

Affleck’s dialogue bristles with lines that may have looked profound as all get-out on Lehane’s pages but sound gaseous and campy when spoken aloud: “What you put out into this world will always come back to you. But it never comes back how you predict.” “Powerful men don’t have to be cruel.” “We all find ourselves in lives we didn’t expect.” “I realized to be free in this life, breaking the rules meant nothing. You had to be strong enough to make your own.”

These and other pearly gems are spoken in the kind of urgent whispers that only self-serious movie actors and people in libraries ever use. That’s probably just as well; otherwise they’d sound like they were coming from one of those motivational speakers you see on PBS.