'Moonlight' Is An Underplayed, Low-key Work Of Stirring Humanity

LIVE BY NIGHT

Do you like Ben Affleck’s smile? That smarmy, insincere smirk, lurking rakishly somewhere North of that granite-carved jawline? The one that lets you know that he knows that he’s charming, and handsome, and can bend the world to his will with a sly flash of teeth? Live By Night, Affleck’s fourth directorial feature, leans on that smile again and again; the filmmaking seeing, in his leading-man mirror, the kind of charisma needed to rise through the gangster ranks in the 1920s, sweet-talkin’ cops and evangelical preachers, greasing the wheels of trade, and banging Sienna Miller and Zoe Saldana along the way.

Live By Night is a Men In Hats movie, a portrait of prohibition-era gangsters and flappers that’s most notable for its wardrobe; Hollywood stars dressed-up like they’re heading to a party at Gatsby’s. So, there goes Affleck, smirk peeking out from beneath a natty fedora, buff Batman bod hidden behind loose, three-piece suits in various shades of cream. He plays a returning WWI soldier who, dismayed at being turned into cannon fodder by Uncle Sam, pledges himself to a life of crime; “I left home a soldier,” Affleck proclaims, in an introductory voice-over, “and came home an outlaw”.

The voice-over betrays the yarn’s origins as a novel: Affleck, as he did with his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, adapting a book by Denis Lehane. Live By Night begins in familiar Lehane/Affleck territories: the mean streets of Boston. It’s here that Affleck, a small-timer who wants no part of (mmmmmm…) organised crime, gets drawn into the stoush between the Irish and Italian mobs, much to the chagrin of his upstanding police-officer pops, who’s played — with no casting concern for how genetics work — by Brendan Gleeson.

Like so many criminals bound for a fall, our anti-hero’s weak-spot is a femme fatale. Miller plays a gangster moll doing him on the sly, Affleck’s voice-over is full of proclamations of love for her, and thus montages of them fucking are set to a score of sentimental strings. There’s plenty of sentimentality, even when — after a bank-heist gone wrong leads to a fine car-chase that soups up tommy-gun tropes to throttling speed — Affleck and his old pal Chris Messina head South to run the rum operation of the Italian mob.

They land in Florida, where there’s Spanish moss, plantation houses, everglades, and Panama hats; and where there’s also Zoe Saldana, upon whom the same lovelorned sentimentality is soon hung. She’s the kind of skirting-the-law skirt who’s happy to go along with our hero’s business interests, but also the kind of woman that makes a man want to be a better man.

The emotional beats are painfully familiar, but Live By Night is blessed with a dark sense of humour, and — as it sprawls, with a novel’s sense of search and scope — a setting that’s unfamiliar. Here, Tampa is a city carved out of a swamp, a frontier outpost more evocative of the Old West than the Old Country. As always, carving out something resembling civilisation in an unforgiving landscape means pointing guns at each other; American foundation myths always facilitated by firearms.

Here, Affleck and Messina don’t have to deal with rival gangsters, but syndicates of a different stripe: the evangelical church, the “landed white gentry” and the KKK. The KKK are, comically, embodied in the form of a Matthew Maher’s cretinous, hair-lipped wannabe, who mixes extortion with self-righteous sermons on the sinfulness of fornicators, Papists and Negroes; the character seeming like a proto Trump voter. The satirical treatment of religious figures — there’s a great, comic exchange about man’s supposed, bible-forbidden desire to “lay down with animals” — gives the film an audaciously agnostic air, which separates it from those old Scorsese clichés of crooks racked by Catholic guilt; with its ending finding its fallen gangster espousing essentially contemporaneous ideas about Earthly life, and the absence of an afterlife.

These sentiments are stolen from a speech by Elle Fanning — the best young actor in the world — who plays the film’s most complex, if still secondary, character: a police-chief’s daughter who heads to LA with dreams of stardom, ends up a junkie turning tricks and taking pics, then returns home to be turned into figure of fallen-angel piety, preaching against vice in the tents of a revival church. Her character possesses a fabulous sense of theatre: every twist and turn, every tribulation, essentially just a different form of performing.

Ideally, the same could be said of Affleck’s own acting, and leading character; but, sadly, there’s little complexity to his role, few layers to pick through. In his best work — as the haughty thespian in Shakespeare In Love, the penance-seeking husband surrogate in the forgotten weepy Bounce, the repellent stockbroker svengali of Boiler Room, the symbol of white-male-privilege in Gone Girl — Affleck uses his self-aware charms to make multi-layered meta-performances: Affleck playing himself playing a character whose life is a performance, a double-faced charade peddled by way of that sly, insincere smile.

It’s notable that only one film, listed above, comes from the past 15 years, in which Affleck’s performances have tended away from the playfulness he’s best wielding, towards a sober, grown-up earnestness. In that past decade-and-a-half, Affleck has risen and fallen twice over; his long, prolific, high-profile career filled with triumph, disaster, public scandal, multiple Michael Bay movies, and, now, a solid slab of time spent playing Batman in reviled branding exercises.

Live By Night was a passion project made during Affleck’s various Caped Crusader Commitments, rushed released to hit the end of the awards season. That it’s failed to crash the Oscar party doesn’t make it a failure; but, when faced with its unsure shifts in tone, its ungainly sprawl, and its unfortunate tendency towards matinée emotion, it’s hard to call it a success, either.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Whilst big brother Ben’s career is under increasing question, Casey Affleck has been all over awards season, winning an endless run of lead-up statues — including a Golden Globe — whilst being installed as prohibitive Best Actor favourite for the upcoming Oscars. All this acclaim comes from Affleck’s turn in Manchester By The Sea (originally Manchester-By-The-Sea, as in its real-life location, only to be stripped of its hyphens by movie marketing), a deep, humanist drama that gives the ‘weepie’ a good name.

It’s a film about trauma, loss, grief; about facing each coming day — the simple act of keeping on — in the wake of tragedy. Affleck plays a broken man, a janitor in suburban Boston who’s only interested in sports, drinking, and bar-fights; some unspoken dark history causing him to look at other people — especially women — with some mixture of anxiety, disinterest and unfathomable distance. He’s lured back to the titular coastal hamlet of his youth by the death of his brother (Kyle Chandler), who has long battled a degenerative heart condition, and who leaves behind an orphaned teenage son (Lucas Hedges, also Oscar-nominated).

It’s here, back in town, that the film begins to swim from present back into the past, minus grandstanding, dissolves, or the clichéd hallmarks of flashback; a past where Affleck was once married-with-kids to Michelle Williams. We’re essentially waiting to discover what, exactly, broke our broken man; left to wonder why the local townsfolk regard him with something between awe and infamy, hostility and pity. It’s a tired trope of Sundance dramas to slow-build to the revelation of the big skeleton in the family closet, but writer/director Kenneth Lonergan uses his screenplay to parcel out information in a way that shifts audience perceptions, and empathy, as it goes. It feels, in many ways, like a character study written in a most familiar fashion: we meet Affleck’s character as if we’d meet any person: knowing, at first, only what we see at face value; only discovering his history as the acquaintance persists, as if we’re building up ‘trust’ as we go.

Lonergan’s first film, 2001’s You Can Count On Me, was a film about grown-up siblings who lost their parents in their childhood, struggling to reconcile old tragedies with new lives; only, there, Lonergan kept his drama in the present, and the emotions underplayed. His second film, the equally maligned and championed Margaret, was shot in 2005 but only released in 2011, becoming more famous for its contentious production than its operatic portrait of adolescent fire and ire. Each of Lonergan’s previous films was notable for its moral complexity; but Manchester By The Sea is remarkable for it.

MOONLIGHT

Sometimes, being at the end of the Earth can be a bitch. Moonlight arrives in Australian cinemas preceded by breathless reviews, consecration as modern-day masterpiece, and a narrative that’s fashioned it as the Oscars’ second-in-line, a woke alternative for those who don’t want to cast their vote for a song-and-dance spectacle filled with Old Hollywood romance. It hits local screens, then, as an odd sort of cinematic event: a small, personal, humble, intimate drama rolled out with expectations outsized, essentially incongruous with the film itself.

Barry Jenkins’ movie — adapted from a stage-play by Tarell Alvin McCraney named, lyrically, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue — is a study of masculinity, and specifically black masculinity, through the prism of one person. Chiron, the lead character, is played at three different times, in three different ways, by three different actors; each united by paralysing questions of identity, and a silent suffering, even as they outwardly project a different façade. Set against a crack-blighted stretch of Miami through the ‘War On Drugs’ years, it’s a story that has a distinct sense of place — both Jenkins and McCraney grew up in the Liberty City neighbourhood they shoot in — but is more interested in how that environment exists in concert, and opposition, to its main character’s identity.

Before he or any of his peers can truly conceive of what sexuality is, the child Chiron (nicknamed Little, and played by Alex Hibbert) has been — through homoeroticised childplay rituals like tackling games, play fights, and cock-measuring contests — sniffed out for his weakness, singled out for his difference, stigmatised and maligned. “What’s a faggot?” he asks Mahershala Ali’s kindly drug-dealer, who’s taken the silent, scared kid, so often abandoned by his wasted mother (Naomie Harris) under his wing.

In childhood, we’re often told, by others, what we ‘are’ before our sense of self takes shape; especially when that exists in opposition to standard models and social norms. Across the years, Chiron learns to suppress his differences; to adopt the acceptable tropes of black masculinity, of ‘hardness’. As teenager (played by Ashton Sanders), he responds to persistent bullying with violent retribution; as adult (and Trevante Rhodes), he’s literally become his childhood saviour, wearing Ali’s doo-rag, his physique, his sense of masculine command, and a grill to boot.

But, existing in contrast to this façade is the vulnerability that comes from his sexuality; first consummated, in adolescence, on a beach with garrulous Kevin (Jharrel Jerome as teenager), who unexpectedly returns to his adult life, years on, as André Holland. When Rhodes and Holland meet again, after all those years, Jenkins doesn’t submit to grand drama, to catharsis or climax; instead, he simply goes on observing, his film a work of stirring humanity.

For a picture that’s been ushered into the awards-show ranks, Moonlight is determinedly low-key; the film underplayed, concerned with interiority, and largely free from flashy photography. There’s crack-smoking and drug dealing, but there’s no guns, no genre tropes, no towering stakes, no ‘Plight Of’ pity. Even when compared to Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight feels small, self-contained, singular; there no emotional fireworks or Oscar-reel-ready big speeches. That makes it a memorable cinematic experience, in its own way; even if the film feels miscast as Oscar-season event movie.

PERFECT STRANGERS

God, this fucking film. Perfect Strangers is to the digital double-lives of modern life as Paul Haggis’s Crash was to race relations. In short: phony, contrived, caricature-riddled, illogical, ludicrously pat; an idea played out with elemental dramatic devices, and nothing remotely related to actual human behaviour. Paolo Genovese — whose career is long on artless, middlebrow comedies — rallies a cast of famous Italian actors for a Film Of Our Times. It comes in the form of a dinner-party game: a host of couples, many of them old friends, decide not to put away their phones for the meal, but leave them out. Every incoming message is to be read aloud, as proof no one has anything to hide.

Of course, everyone does, and all the various skeletons that come tumbling out are howling clichés: people are having affairs, lying to their partners, in the closet, functional alcoholics, living double lives. It’s a film out to puncture the polite façade of the bourgeoisie, but there’s no teeth to its writing, no charm to its script, no elegance to its presentation. The characters don’t feel — or act — like human beings, only avatars of a simple, dopey idea. And that idea is elemental at best, intelligence-insulting at worst; Perfect Strangers a message movie for morons.