Killing Them Softly is a routine heist film decorated with existential angst. It resembles a film noir from the fifties, albeit stylishly produced and featuring an all-star cast. The picture is worth seeing because of two scenes featuring James Gandolfini. I have moral reservations about the picture's theme and pervasive nihilism. The film was released in 2012 and directed by Andrew Dominik, an interesting Australian filmmaker best known in the this country for his prosaically titled and intensely morose Western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. The movie is based on a novel by George V. Higgins, Cogan's Trade, although ostensibly set in Boston, the movie was filmed in New Orleans, including a opening sequence featuring the apocalyptic devastation in the city's 9th Ward.
Two generic, small-time hoodlums conspire with a low-level crime boss named Squirrel to rob a poker game. The game is proprietary to another criminal, Markie (Ray Liotta), apparently, an employee of the Mob. Markie has previously staged a robbery of his own game and pocketed the proceeds. The thugs in Higgins' novels are exceedingly loquacious and Markie has boasted about this exploit. The two petty criminals believe that Markie will get blamed for this crime as well and that they can commit the robbery with impunity.
The two robbers, Frankie and his Australian heroin-addict buddy, Russell, successfully knock-over the game. The mob is upset and a professional killer is engaged to clean up the mess. This killer, Jackie (Brad Pitt) decides that Markie has to be punished, even though it's evident to him that he had nothing to do with the heist. Meanwhile, Russell, who has a side gig, stealing dogs and transporting them to Florida for sale, has shot off his mouth and boasted about the crime. Jackie realizes that Frankie, Russell, and their mentor, Squirrel are responsible for the theft. He arranges to have Markie beat half to death as punishment and, later, guns him down in a showy sequence filmed in ultra-slow motion -- we see bullets piercing windows in ornate sprays of glass and ejected cartridges twirling through the air like space ships in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. (This Matrix-style mayhem is a complete divergence from the film's otherwise scrupulous meanness and, although impressive, seems to me to be a mistake.) Jackie knows Squirrel and seems to think it might be a conflict of interest to kill this man himself. (This part of the movie is unintelligible from a plot perspective.) Jackie hires Mickie, an aging hit man from New York, to murder Squirrel and, possibly, one or two of the other guys. Mickie, an once fearsome murderer, turns out to be a disappointment. He's drinking heavily and holes up in a hotel room ordering room-service booze and prostitutes. It becomes clear to Jackie that Mickie (James Gandolfini) is useless. So he arranges for Mickie, a felon in possession of firearms, to be arrested in a "whore-fight" in the hotel. Jackie, then, forces information from the hapless Frankie and, with him, guns down Squirrel outside his girlfriend's apartment. Jackie, then, kills Frankie in an underground parking ramp. Russell is arrested by the cops when he tries to access his stash of heroin -- he has used his share of the dough to buy drugs. Jackie then meets his handler, a lawyer or accountant working for the mob, in a bar. Barack Obama is giving his inaugural address on TV. The mob lawyer, called Driver in the credits (because he and Jackie always meet in his car in desolate locations), refuses to pay the pre-negotiated price for the three killings. Jackie is outraged and delivers these famous lines from this film: "We're livin' in America and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's a business. So fuckin' pay me." On this cheery note, the film goes dark -- although we hear, as if a faint memory, sounds of people celebrating Obama's election in the distance. Jackie's final peroration is triggered by Obama's televised speech, particularly the President's assertion that all men are equal and that they form a "community."
The movie was completed in a 2 1/2 hour version, cut down to about 100 minutes and, obviously, lots of narrative integument and subplot is missing. We never see the "whore fight" that results in Mickie's arrest and there is a shadowy figure called Dillon whom everyone fears played by Sam Shepherd who appears in only one short scene -- he gets mentioned every ten minutes, but it isn't clear who he is. (And we learn in the last scene that he has apparently died -- why this is significant is unclear.) The mob itself is a remote corporation that does business by committee decision and moves very slowly and erratically. Parts of the film involving unseen forces controlling the action play out like a crime film version of Kafka. The governing metaphor is that crime is the business of American -- that is, everyone robs everyone else -- and this point is hammered home by the film's sound design: we are constantly hearing about the 2008-2009 financial crisis as discussed on TVs operating unseen in the corner's of squalid rooms. This theme, highly questionable in my view, is obsessively mentioned, but the metaphor that crime and business and politics are all "of imagination compact" as the Bard would have it, is a mere allusion, a conceit that is never plausibly developed. Allegorically, I suppose, the poker game might stand for the stock market and banking industry, an enterprise designed to cheat the rubes on Main Street. But, then, this makes Jackie some kind of super-Regulator, an enforcer of banking anti-corruption rules, and this clearly isn't the director Dominik's intent. The plot is full of odd twists and turns that don't make sense, most notably importing Gandolfini's ruined killer into the story -- that subplot literally goes nowhere and doesn't even pay-off in a scene showing the con arrested by the cops after the altercation with the prostitute. However, Higgins' novels were nothing more than frameworks on which to suspend showy dialogue laced with arcane criminal lingo and, when this is realized, some of the oddities of the film make sense. The movie is really just a series of profane conversations that we're supposed to enjoy for their exotic and colorful language. The dialogue doesn't exist for the purpose of driving the plot; rather, the plot exists as an occasion for the dialogue.
Nihilism is fashionable and this film is about as nihilistic as can be imagined. But it's idiocy to contend that America is nothing more than a criminal enterprise and that American history is merely a narrative of theft and rapine. ("The reason America loves a crime story," says Chris Rock in the TV show Fargo "is that America is a crime story," a picturesque, but equally vapid, formulation of this declaration.) There is really no practical connection between organized crime and business -- the two enterprises are linked by a profit motive but that's about all. Therefore, the premise of the movie is all wrong and, furthermore, destructive. Dominik made this film in 2012 when Barack Obama was President. In the film, he declares that all politicians are crooks and that all human endeavor is theft. This may be true to some limited extent, but a perception of this sort leads to destructive cynicism. Indeed, one might argue (incorrectly I think) that this sort of fashionable nihilism led in some ways to the election of Donald Trump -- if all politicians are criminal, then, why not elect someone who is overtly a fraud and mobster? One shudders to think what kind of movie Dominik would make on this subject now, after the four year reign of terror and incompetence instituted by Donald Trump. We think of the Obama era as the gold standard for rectitude and justice in politics. And Killing them Softly is based on Dominik's discontent with that era.
The movie is full of puzzling features. The soundtrack uses old songs like "It's only a Paper Moon" and "Life is just a bowl of cherries" to comment ironically on the mayhem that we witness. Who is listening to these songs and how are they relevant? Dominik also plays Petulia Clark's "The Windmills of the Mind", possibly a homage to the period in which Higgins set his novel, but incongruous in a film rooted so exactly in 2008 and early 2009. The figure of the relentless enforcer played by Brad Pitt derives in large part from the role of Harvey Keitel as the equally remorseless and unflappable fixer in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The reason that I can recommend the movie are two extended dialogue scenes with James Gandolfini playing the despairing assassin turned alcoholic. Gandolfini exudes brutish menace but his speeches are surprisingly delicate and, even, poetic -- he desperately fears being returned to prison (which is what will happen to him) mostly because he expects his wife will divorce him. He is spending his money on booze and hookers, yet, he seems weirdly concerned about his wife and recalls other sexual liaisons with an almost lyrical intensity. When asked to commit the murders, he simply repeats (Bartleby style): "I can't go out." The sequence leads nowhere from a narrative perspective but, it seems, a devastating cautionary warning to Brad Pitt's character -- this, it seems, is the price of the enterprise in which they are involved.
You can learn interesting things from watching movies. In The Dig, someone finds a "Merovingian Tremissis" -- this is a kind of coin from the sixth century. In Killing Them Softly, the thugs call people "ginzos" -- a "ginzo" is a no-account Sicilian criminal.
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