Killing Them Softly
A mob flick packing a blunt force metaphor you can't refuse.
DIRECTED BY ANDREW DOMINIK
Unlike protagonist Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a mob enforcer whose preferred method of dispatching his marks lends Killing Them Softly its title, writer-director Andrew Dominik seems to have developed a disdain for subtlety. Perhaps spurred by the mixed reception for his languorously understated The Assissination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik has re-purposed George V. Higgins’ 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade as a blunt-force allegory for the moral and literal bankruptcy of recession-era America. He takes pains to ensure that his scathing “subtext” will be lost on no one.
Mimicking its unforgiving underworld milieu, this is the sort of film that straps audience members to their seats and sets about pulverizing them with its message—namely that there’s no distinction to be drawn between America’s legitimate economy and its criminal one. Via increasingly obtrusive soundbites culled from coverage of 2008’s financial collapse and concurrent presidential campaign—and, ultimately, by way of smugly scornful declarations—the Australian filmmaker condemns America as “just a business,” and a dirty one, at that.
If not without foundation, his ferocious indictment of American capitalism is both tone deaf and slightly disingenuous, given that, in Pitt, his film is fronted by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars (and the recipient of a reported $7 million paycheque for a recent gig shilling Channel No. 5), and marketed by Tinseltown kingpin Harvey Weinstein.
And yet, when Dominik isn’t accenting his cynical diatribe with thuddingly obvious soundtrack cuts, or self-indulgent displays of balletic, slow-mo brutality, Killing Them Softly is often grimly engaging and acidly funny. For this, Higgins’ cultured ear for streetwise dialogue deserves significant credit, as do top-form turns from the film’s superb cast, which includes Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, and Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn, here fantastically repellant as a thick-skulled smack addict who sticks up the wrong poker racket.
What a shame, then, that Dominik undermines their contributions by so frequently overplaying his hand. Contemporizing Cogan’s Trade as a socioeconomic metaphor was by no means a bad idea, but Dominik urgently needs to take greater heed of his new title’s operative adverb.