Killing Them Softly
Andrew Dominik (2012)
Andrew Dominik’s previous film was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). I gave it a miss not only because it was a Western but also because of its self-important title. Pompous sarcasm is among the several unpleasant qualities of this new movie. In the opening sequence a young man who looks rough is trudging through a desolate urban landscape. On the soundtrack is the voice of Barack Obama, imparting his message of hope during the 2008 presidential election campaign. Contrasting what politicians say with how things really are is hardly original but I assumed that Dominik was using it merely as a convenient scene-setting device and that he would quickly move on. (I should have known better as soon as he underlined the point he’d already made with a shot of billboards showing Obama and John McCain overlooking the same waste land the young man was walking through. In the next half hour there are also clips of George W Bush speeches about the financial meltdown). The final scene of Killing Them Softly takes place in a bar on election night in November 2008. Here Obama’s words aren’t just a counterpoint to the beatings and killings featured in the intervening movie. The protagonist, a hitman called Jackie Cogan, takes scathing issue with the inspirational message of the president-to-be. ‘He’ll be saying next that we’re a community’, Jackie scoffs, ‘America isn’t a community – it’s just a business’. This tremendous insight is the very last line of the script but, again in case the message hasn’t been received, Dominik plays ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ over the closing credits.
It’s true that, on the basis of what’s gone before, Jackie’s message might not have got across. Much of what’s said in Killing Them Softly is hard to make out and, since there’s a lot of talking, inaudibility might seem to matter a great deal – most of the film consists of conversations between different pairs of men. (I can recall only one female character – a prostitute, whose function in her one scene is less to supply sex than to interrupt one of these conversations). Yet I wasn’t sure at the end that it did matter. Of course if you can’t hear the lines you don’t know what you’re missing but I wonder if Dominik gets his cast, and particularly Brad Pitt as Jackie, to speak up when they’re delivering what Dominik considers the best lines that he’s supplied. (He did the adaptation, updating a 1974 novel called Cogan’s Trade by George V Higgins.) Pitt’s explanation of the title also comes across loud and clear: Jackie prefers not to shoot people he knows or at close range – he doesn’t like ‘feelings’ to complicate the issue. In any case, Dominik seems less interested in involving the audience in the plot or characters than in excoriation of their way of life and, by extension, the rottenness of the society of which they’re part. Except for a few witty details in the performances of Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini, Killing Me Softly is humourless but Dominik’s chilly derision is being praised by the likes of Peter Bradshaw as ‘an icily confident black comedy of continued disillusion’.
Dominik has a style but the stylishness of Killing Them Softly is tediously studied. The bleakness of the physical settings (New Orleans – although I didn’t pick this up until I read about the film afterwards) and its moral landscape is overemphasised by the terrible weather. It’s often pouring with rain and never seems to get fully light. When the action isn’t taking place in darkness, the DoP Greig Fraser’s palette comprises greys, browns and sickly greens. It’s no coincidence that the only moment of beauty occurs when Jackie, from his preferred shooting distance, fires a hail of bullets through a car window to finish off a man called Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who’s already been on the receiving end of nearly lethal violence from others. The car window shatters exquisitely; the fountain of shattered glass and blood is perfectly designed. Dominik’s choice of ironic music, however, is embarrassingly heavy-handed. The killing of Trattman is accompanied by ‘Love Letters’. Other murderous highlights are scored by the sunny side up hits of a previous time of economic depression, even though Dennis Potter was there more than thirty years ago. (The hoods of 2008 have the damnedest music playing in their cars.) The sweaty, drug-fuelled intensity of Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn as that ruffian at the start and his Aussie sidekick is overdone and hollow but the main men are good (as is Linara Washington in her brief appearance). Dominik had worked with Brad Pitt on Jesse James and Pitt (who also co-produced) is cast very effectively. His essential affability means that he doesn’t have to strain to get across what’s most alarming about the film’s conception of Jackie Cogan – that he’s a reasonable man working for a living.
23 September 2012