BEFORE: Day 3 of Ben Affleck week, with two films to go after this.
THE PLOT: A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.
AFTER: For some reason, Hollywood just loves to romanticize the time of Prohibition, and maybe it's an easy thing to do because revisionist history tells us how "wrong" it was to criminalize alcohol, because all that did was create more criminals, instead of changing people's behavior. But yet we're unable as a country to carry those lessons forward, which would lead to de-criminalizing marijuana, or apply them instead to something meaningful, like gun control. But the movies will keep showing us bootleggers and gun-runners from the 1930's as if they're heroes, or at least anti-heroes.
Logically it just doesn't work, so for good measure here they use Southerners as foil characters, as if our Irish anti-hero from Boston is doing terrible things, but in a "good" or at least "better" way, because at least he's not racist like the Southern gangsters are. Really? I mean, I get that the Klan is/was wrong, which most right-minded people seem to agree on (with some key exceptions this year) but can we really say that one gangster/killer/bootlegger is "better" than the other because he's in a relationship with a woman of color? He's doing just as many illegal things as everyone around him, but because he's got love in his heart for a Cuban/African-American woman, well, by all means, lets' root for him. Carry on with your illegal activities, and be sure to kill all the Southern racists while you're at it.
He also fights a different form of racism, as a man of Irish descent who feels the need to succeed in the Italian mafia, and initially this comes from ambition combined with carrying on an affair with an Italian mobster's girlfriend, but those motivations only carry the character so far, at some point if he talks like a gangster, dresses like a gangster and acts like a gangster, he's a gangster, right? So any desire to see him succeed, even if he's the central character, feels a bit misguided.
The rest just sort of feels like coincidence and complications, because he befriends the local sheriff in Florida (who's helpful in mediating things between him and the Klan, up to a point anyway) but the sheriff's daughter heads out to Hollywood to become famous, and things don't go her way. It's an incredible coincidence that our man would be aware of the troubles that she encountered there, and an even greater coincidence that she would overcome them and become a popular advocate against both drinking and gambling, the two things that our hero intends to profit from. Karma's a bitch, it may give but then it also takes away, I guess. Or what comes around, goes around.
This was based on a long novel written by Dennis Lehane, and considering that the film's initial running time of three hours eventually got cut down to just over two, and that several prominent actors who filmed scenes for it had their parts removed entirely, it seems that there may have been problems with the story, that needed to be solved by trimming and more trimming, until only the most basic skeleton of a story remained, and that has to affect certain reasons for things happening, or some shades of characters somewhere.
Also starring Zoe Saldana (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Chris Cooper (last heard in "Cars 3"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Trumbo"), Remo Girone, Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Chris Messina (last seen in "Rounders"), Max Casella (last seen in "Jackie"), Miguel, Christian Clemenson (last seen in "Heartburn"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "Trumbo"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "Labor Day"), Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Chris Sullivan (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Gianfranco Terrin.
RATING: 4 out of 10 barrels of rum
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