Ben Affleck can make a good, smart film. In this richly detailed 1920s film noir he uses the genre conventions to anatomize contemporary America. That is, Donald Trump’s America.
The film is framed by the two world wars. Joe Coughlin comes home from the First, disillusioned, betrayed by authority, determined to be an outlaw, despite his father’s being a prominent honest cop. At the end he has survived a gang war, won and walked away from a criminal empire, and lost his two great loves. At a Saturday matinee with his son, he watches a Hitler newsreel. Germany won’t go to war, he assures himself.
Well, Germany did. WW II waits in the wings. Hitler’s strategies to turn a democracy into his dictatorship seem eerily repeated now. Proving Affleck’s prescience, the first days of the Trump presidency reveal the leader’s suppression of the press, science, education, dissent and the marginalized, the standard dictator’s game plan.
In a genre film as in water, the flavour derives from the impurities, in the inflections played upon the familiar conventions.
For example, Coughlin is a modest criminal, content to be a robber, with no ambition to be a gangster. He opts to stay out of the gang war. He’s (literally) a white suit villain which makes him a relative hero in this criminal world. “You realize to be free in this life, breaking the rules meant nothing. You have to be strong enough to make your own.” He eschews selling drugs and women, satisfied to deal just in demon rum and gambling. He also has the will to leave his evil empire behind.
The film’s identity politics begins with the genre’s familiar clash between the Irish and the Italian criminal worlds. But Affleck digs deeper. Coughlin’s first love Emma is ruined by her inability to overcome not just the anti-Irish bigotry but her own lack of self-respect it causes. The clash between these ethnic groups also points to Trump’s cultivated prejudice against immigrants.
A more significant inflection is the involvement of the Klu Kux Klan in this film’s criminality. I don’t remember the Klan as a significant player in any other American gangster film. Here it represents the bedrock of racism that persists in American culture and the criminal undertow in society’s more respectable areas, corporate, judicial, social. As the Grand Wizard says behind his cigar-factory desk, “We’re clerks, bankers, police officers, we ain't gotta judge. And if ya gonna fight us, I'm gonna rain bloody hellfire down on you and all you love.” David Duke’s endorsement of Trump and celebration of his win confirm this currency.
Affleck also adds the strong theme of religious fundamentalism, a pillar of the current Republican platform. Hence the Figgis subplot.
Chief Figgis is an upfront cop who allows Coughlin a safe territory but also protects his crazed crooked brother-in-law (“dumb as a grape”). To turn Figgis against the overreaching dolt, Coughlin deploys what he knows about Figgis’s pretty young daughter. Her Hollywood dream shattered, the innocent Loretta has fallen into drugs and prostitution.
Loretta’s story reflects upon America’s extremist right puritanism. Having pulled her out of the drug and prostitution scene, her father literally flays the sin out of her, an especially salacious discipline. The whipping is shadowed by her line, “He can’t stop thinking about other men doing to me what he did to my mother.” Here Figgis evokes the Republican moralists themselves busted for gay sex and adultery, the very targets of their righteous rhetoric. Figgis can’t forgive Coughlin for revealing his daughters fate to him, even though it enabled him to save her. He ends his life compulsively muttering “Repent,” then dies trying to kill Coughlin.
Loretta turns into a moral crusader, sensationalizing her sinful past to win the reputation of a saver of souls. After thwarting Coughlin’s casino plans she privately tells him her own doubts about God and any heavenly afterlife. Then she slashes her throat — on her father’s bed. Her righteousness proves as inadequate as her self-debasement.
From her Coughlin picks up the idea that the only heaven we ever have is this life and we’re messing it up. The heaven on earth is the point of the hero’s two great loves, one ended by betrayal, the other by the intrusion of the righteous madman. So, too, the violent narrative is punctuated with interludes of breath-taking beauty, whether scenes of nature or the elegance of a simple motion. When a man is thrown to his sidewalk death, his hat wafts down elegantly beside him. There is natural beauty, accidental beauty, but we’re turning our one and present heaven into hell.
As a reflection upon today’s America, perhaps the film’s key scene is Coughlin’s final confrontation of his mentor Pescatore. Coughlin dismisses the mobster’s pretence to values and honour with a survey of all the communities who are helplessly deceived, exploited, abused and robbed by their systemic overlords. If the thus abused and deprived ever collect their will and force he would not want to stand between them and what they deserve. That energizing of the abused is what Hitler achieved — and what just got Donald J. Trump elected too, despite his utter inadequacy for the office.
As a reflection upon today’s America, perhaps the film’s key scene is Coughlin’s final confrontation of his mentor Pescatore. Coughlin dismisses the mobster’s pretence to values and honour with a survey of all the communities who are helplessly deceived, exploited, abused and robbed by their systemic overlords. If the thus abused and deprived ever collect their will and force he would not want to stand between them and what they deserve. That energizing of the abused is what Hitler achieved — and what just got Donald J. Trump elected too, despite his utter inadequacy for the office.
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