Killing
Them Softly
Rough
trade
“America's
not a country. It's a
business. Now fucking pay
me.”
No
shots are fired, no beatings administered but when cool, ruthless enforcer
Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) tells his Mob handler (Richard Jenkins) the facts of life in a New
Orleans bar on the eve of Obama’s election while the US (and indeed the world)
spirals into financial meltdown, it feels like the most violent scene in an
already wincingly violent movie.
As Jenkins procrastinates and tries to explain to Pitt that theirs is a
business of relationships, Pitt simply scoffs: “I live in America. And in America, you’re on your own.”
Adapted
from The Friends Of Eddie Coyle author George V. Higgins’ hard-as-nails crime novel Cogan’s
Trade and
updated from ‘70s Boston to post-Katrina New Orleans, everyone is on their own
in Australian writer/director Andrew Dominik’s second collaboration with star Brad Pitt,
Killing Them Softly. Low-level mobster
Johnny (Vincent Curatola) hires bozos Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben
Mendelsohn)
to knock over the high-stakes poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) reasoning that, as Markie
once robbed his own game and got away with it, suspicion will fall on him and
he’ll take the fall. Richard
Jenkins’ middle management fixer tasks Pitt’s shrewd professional Cogan with
investigating and resolving the situation. An example has to be made, confidence must be restored. Guilty or innocent, Trattman has to be
whacked. And Frankie, Russell and
Johnny can’t be too far behind.
Cogan knows Johnny personally however so he sub-contracts the job to
legendary hitman and friend New York Mickey (James Gandolfini). But the alcoholic Mickey is way past his best. He’s in the grip of a messy breakdown
and more interested in booze and hookers than doing his job. Increasingly exasperated by the lack of
professionalism he has to deal with, it falls to Cogan to set things right.
Tough,
stylish and grimly nihilistic, Killing Them Softly is a violent, bleakly funny,
crime parable which, after his lush, beautiful, melancholic ode to the passing
of the Old West, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, feels closer in spirit and
execution to Dominik’s first film, the darkly funny Chopper. Unlike the cheerfully demented Chopper however, Pitt’s
laconic Cogan is all business. And
doing business is what the film is all about. Just as America’s economy is imploding, the bottom-feeding
criminals of Cogan’s world are also being forced to tighten their belts;
murder’s just the cost of doing business but even that cost is being driven
down due to recession. While
Dominik may hammer home his political points a little unsubtly (almost every
scene of note has a TV or radio somewhere in the background providing
electioneering commentary) his tight, authentic dialogue sings off the page
with some of Gandolfini’s monologues brilliantly judged while Cogan’s climactic
dissection of America is stunning and provocative; the souring of the American
Dream set in stone.
Visually
and aurally, Killing Them Softly stuns. Post-Katrina, the derelict washed out streets of New Orleans
where the film plays out, glisten with rot and malice. The assorted hoods and their
gas-guzzling cars are throwbacks to a bygone age; dinosaurs in a modern world. Russell’s slo-mo drug-addled
perceptions of a world filled with distorted sound, vision and time are fun and
the set-piece scenes of violence, the beatings and shootings, are sudden,
surprising and sickening with only one, the slow-motion execution of one victim
in a blizzard of bullets and broken glass, rendered almost abstract by its
beauty.
As
you’d expect the performances are nigh on perfect. Gandolfini and Mendelsohn provide some much-needed light
relief in the darkness, Mendelson’s befuddled Aussie junkie Russell in
particular is an inspired creation, and Jenkins stressed, nebbish Mob middleman
could be any visiting area manager of a large corporation. As the doomed Trattman, Liotta invests
his character with a tragic, wounded nobility while Scoot McNairy delivers a
whiny, nervy Frankie, a sympathetic loser in way over his head who’s just
trying to stay alive. It’s Pitt
who dominates the film though from the moment his leather-jacketed shark Cogan
enters the film to Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around. It’s a tight, nuanced performance which may finally see Pitt
get the Oscar he should have got last year for Moneyball.
Harsh,
brutal and unforgiving, Killing Them Softly is a gritty, jaundiced vision of America
in turmoil that may just be the finest American film of the year.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy,
Ben Mendelsohn,
James Gandolfini, Vincent Curatola, Richard Jenkins and Ray Liotta
Genres:
Crime, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 37
minutes
Certificate:
18
Rating:
5/5
UK
Release Date:
21st
of September 2012
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