4/5
Even for a gangster movie Killing
Them Softly is grisly. It’s
surprising how elaborately it also functions as an allegory for the Stock
Market collapse of 2008, a far less physical but considerably more detrimental
series of crimes. The film was
written and directed by Andrew Dominick, the Australian best known for his
lyrical, revisionist Western, The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That film was a masterpiece, a poetic
historical tragedy that introduced Brad Pitt as a born-again great actor. Only Dominick’s third feature, this is
his second already tackling the ruthless landscape of American outlaws. With Brad Pitt back as the central
anti-hero, Dominick’s latest is cynical and violent—maybe too much so for some—but
its formal audacity, thematic wit, and chilling lead performance make it a
visceral and intellectual piece of high-brow pulp art.
Brad Pitt plays mob
enforcer Jackie Cogan who’s assigned to punish the hoods (Scoot McNairy, Ben
Mendelsohn) who unwisely knocked-over a mob-financed poker game. Analogous to Lehman Brothers’
bankruptcy and the crisis it fomented, the heist unbalances the criminal
underworld; big-spending players will no longer risk their cash, which causes
problems for the whole black market economy. Jackie is summoned to set a precedent (don’t mess with the
Mafia!) and to restore order and faith in the system. He uses every trick in the hit man handbook—beatings,
shootings, intimidation, and deception—to that end. If the stick-up men are crooked investors, taking advantage
of a sensitive fiscal ecosystem, then Jackie is a government bailout with all
the associated unscrupulousness.
Pitt’s performance—yet
another in a recent streak of tour-de-forces—is terrifyingly calm. Jackie’s a tranquil surface atop
fearsome depths, like a beckoning hot tub filled with hydrochloric acid. He’s a sociopath, no doubt, but he’s no
sadist; he’s pragmatic, a business-like problem-solver that trades uppercuts
instead of bonds and carries hollow-points instead of fountain pens. In furtive rendezvous with a
shark-suited mob rep (Richard Jenkins), Jackie expresses his distaste for
face-to-face slayings: “There’s too many feelings,” he says. He’s a terminator who prefers to dish
out homicides like they’re pink slips.
Through his gutsy conceit, Dominick blurs any moral distinction between
corporatized thugs and thuggish corporations. Although his allegory is slightly belabored with overused
campaign-speech sound bites, the director’s ideas are still caustic and urgent.
In Jesse James, Dominick displayed his gift for elegant imagery and his
eagerness for aesthetic and stylistic experimentation. In Killing Them Softly, he stages the
instigating robbery with a conscious banality, stretching it out like taffy to
the point of tedious intensity. It’s
no Michael Mann set piece pulled off by swift, efficient professionals; it’s an
exercise in ineptitude featuring two amateurish bums in dishwashing gloves and
panty-hose shrouds. Later, an
assassination unfolds in operatic slow motion amidst a gale of falling rain and
shattering glass. A conversation
between conspirators intermittently fades in and out as if from consciousness,
ebbing and flowing like a conversation attempted from a heroin coma. Scored to dreamy golden oldies (“It’s
Only A Paper Moon”, for instance), the violence is nauseating and the victims
are as pitiable as bunny rabbits.
The carnage has a merciless horror that’s hard to forgive or forget.
The world of Killing Them Softly is an asphalt jungle indeed: predators and prey on the prowl in the most Darwinian sense. American individualism is the target of Dominick’s cinematic scrutiny, and Jackie Cogan embodies its dog-eat-dog competitiveness—that strangle-your-neighbor-with-your-bootstraps kind of corrupted capitalist dream. Admittedly, the movie has an avante garde narrative shapelessness (especially during James Gandolfini’s distended romantic monologues) that can be trying, and Jesse James was definitely a subtler film. Still, with its overcast monochromatic look and its sequences of hideous human cruelty, the film is gorgeous in its very ugliness, hypnotically hooking you before pulling the trigger. Killing Them Softly is a gentle whisper followed by a brass-knuckle sandwich. It leaves a bruise.
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