Killing them Softly

Killing them Softly – A puzzling neo-noir that will please no one, Andrew Dominick’s Killing Them Softly seems to be designed as a series of verbal arias for its actors. Brad Pitt plays a contract killer. Since he produced the film, he gets the last word, a Mamet-style monologue about American enterprise and crime – it’s undeniably impressive but trite. James Gandolfini plays another contract killer who is drunk, over-the-hill, and profoundly depressed. He does a brilliant job with a minor part that goes nowhere – indeed, that can’t go anywhere by definition: the character is so deeply morose and embittered that he can’t perform the killing that he’s been hired to execute and gets double-crossed offscreen, vanishing from the picture. The premise of the film is that two moron junkies rob a card game at the behest of a minor gangster who runs a Laundromat. The card game, operated by Ray Liotta, has been robbed before – by Liotta himself. This time Liotta is blamed and to maintain street credibility the card game’s boss has Liotta killed (even though he knows that he didn’t, in fact, plan the second heist). The identity of the true perpetrators of the robbery is discovered and Pitt’s character is supposed to murder them as well. The movie consists of three interwoven strands – virtuoso and extended dialogue sequences between various criminals, images of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, providing an ironic counterpoint to the action (similar to the way Hal Ashby structured his sex comedy Shampoo way back in the Nixon era), and gruesome scenes of assassinations and beatings, often filmed in ultra slow-motion. The movie is very well made but completely pointless. The acting is superb, particularly James Gandolfini’s turn as the depressed murderer, but it’s all just standard film noir stuff – gangster-posturing that these actors outgrew twenty years ago. There’s no resonance between the low-rent crime plot and the national election. This kind of film was made cheaply and with low-budget actors in the fifties and Killing Them Softly, which has pretentions as art, isn’t an improvement over similar film noir made sixty years ago. The soundtrack, which features incongruously old songs (for instance, Paper Moon) is intrusive and doesn’t help matters. The movie is probably better than it seems and is only 90 minutes long – its nastiness is pretty efficient. The problem with the picture is that the elaborate duets in gangster argot, which are pretty entertaining, work on one level but the murders, however, seem filmed as pure exercises in hyper-violent sadism. So how are we supposed to react to the picture as a whole? Are we supposed to enjoy the violence or despise it? The film can’t make up its mind. (A useful comparison for this film is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the Mitchum picture directed by Peter Yates – also a film, like this picture, based on a George V. Higgins novel. That picture also puzzled audiences when it was released, was much better than it first seemed to be, and now has a cult following; perhaps, this film will also be admired in the future. But I don’t think so.)