“Killing Them Softly”

We tend to deride blatancy in movies, but when used well it can be brilliantly effective. The new mob picture Killing Them Softly is a critique of American capitalism that has absolutely no use for subtlety, announcing its allegorical intentions immediately over the opening credits. On the soundtrack: the voice of presidential candidate Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, speaking of freedom and the greatness of America. On the screen: a two-bit hood walking the half-abandoned, litter-strewn streets of New Orleans, looking like the last man on Earth. Though none of the film’s crooked characters have any interest in politics, they exemplify the capitalist ethos, and they’re constantly surrounded by radios, TVs, and newspapers documenting the financial collapse and the impending Hope-and-Change presidential election. Some will call this parallelism heavy-handed, but I found it thrillingly explicit. Killing Them Softly has some of the naked, blunt ambition of the socially conscious crime pictures of the 1930s, particularly Scarface and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, and what it lacks in nuance it makes up for in style and brute force. It’s not saying anything we don’t already know, but it says it so well it feels like a lightning bolt scorching the theatre screen.

Adapted from the George V. Higgins novel Cogan’s Trade (which was written in the cynical Nixon era), Killing Them Softly is about the aftermath of a robbery, one that destabilizes an entire underworld ecosystem. The film begins with the anxious Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and the foolishly confident Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) preparing to knock over a poker game involving all the local crime scene’s biggest players. The man who tipped them off, a crooked dry cleaner named Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola, of The Sopranos), is certain the robbery will be traced back not to them but to Markie (Ray Liotta), the good-time guy who runs the game and notoriously robbed it once before. It’s not the sturdiest assumption, and afterwards the furious mob bosses easily figure out who the real culprits are. But because word on the street is that Markie did it, the bosses hire hitman Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to whack him anyway, simply for the optics. Cogan’s next targets, of course, will be Frankie, Russell, and Johnny.

It’s a fairly standard mob movie plot, and one of the film’s great strengths is that it rivets us without ever pretending otherwise. Nothing that happens is treated as anything more than business as usual, and the outbursts of violence alternate with languid, casual conversations in which the characters take stock of their profession and their lives. Some of the wittiest scenes are between Cogan and a mob functionary played by Richard Jenkins; they sit underneath a bridge in a parked car, rain battering the hood, and they compare notes like two weary businessmen commiserating over a stiff drink. In a completely different register, Cogan meets with a fellow hitman (James Gandolfini) who’s in full-on mid-life-crisis mode. This guy is so preoccupied with his crumbling marriage and an impending prison term that he can’t get it together to do a simple job for Cogan. Gandolfini has only two scenes, but they’re long ones and they leave a major impression. His bitterness and self-pity are like toxins invading your blood stream.

Writer-director Andrew Dominik (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) shoots the dialogue scenes very simply, letting his performers establish the rhythms. Even the heist, which is magnificently tense, is more a matter of crosscurrents between the actors than of directorial flourish — McNairy’s barely suppressed panic, Mendelsohn’s reckless movements, Liotta’s affected calm as he tries to keep the situation contained. But when Dominik wants to get stylish, he has few peers. He stages a beating in a trailer that’s like a half-glimpsed slapstick routine, a drug-trip that’s like a waxing and waning solar eclipse, and a car crash that’s like a mini apocalypse. His style isn’t all bravura moments, though; often it’s more a matter of thoughtful framing. Certain shots that would be unremarkable in other films — like one of the night sky over an abandoned mini-mall, a radio tower blinking in the distance — feel impeccably, mysteriously right. Along with Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, Killing Them Softly is easily the best directed picture of the year.

But to return to the film’s political overlay, is it simply too much? I’ll concede Dominik could’ve used the radio and TV broadcasts more sparingly, but to an extent he’s honestly conveying what it felt like to be living through that election year — everywhere you turned, even here in Canada, it was Downturn-this and Obama-that, like a buzzing in your ear. And as for the charge emanating from certain critical quarters that the film trucks in empty cynicism, I’ll just point to the film’s final scene, which is, yes, incredibly cynical, but far from empty. In movies, as in all other narrative art forms, moral conviction is dramatic conviction, and though Cogan’s final, blistering summation of America may not be particularly original, it’s delivered so expertly and with such bitter relish that it stings anyway. The bitterness feels earned.

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