Brad Pitt stars in ‘Killing Them Softly’, the new movie from
Australian director Andrew Dominik, best known for his last collaboration with
Pitt for the slow-burning elegiac western, The Assassination of Jesse James by
the Coward Robert Ford. Eschewing a return to the old west, Dominik decided
instead to adapt a 70s crime novel called ‘Cogan’s Trade’. The story revolves around a high stakes poker
game organised by mobster Ray Liotta which is robbed my masked assailants.
Jackie Cogan (Pitt), a mob enforcer, is called in to investigate and clean up
the ensuing mess.
The whole affair is decidedly 70s. In a post-Tarantino world
of fast snappy crime thrillers, Dominik slows the action and the dialogue to a
crawl, favouring a style reminiscent of classic gritty thrillers like Get Carter and Scorsese’s early work on
movies like Mean Streets. As a result, Killing Them Softly can be slow at
times, requiring a great deal of patience from the audience as it’s slow to
pick up at the start. Scenes of violence are few and far between, but when they
arrive they pack a punch and are shot in painstaking detail. Again like Get Carter,
the violence here has consequences which permeate throughout the story. While the films is visually arresting, Dominik
tends to rely on one thing throughout the movie. In almost every scene, there
are TV and radio broadcasts of President Bush and the then Senator Obama, as
the film is set during the 2008 election. We are treated to comments on the
state of America and mainly its financial system and the financial crisis.
Indeed the whole film could be seen as a parable for the financial crisis, with
words like ‘collapse of confidence’ thrown around a lot. While the films
ambition to make a political statement is admirable, the message is muddled at
best, and the talking heads distract from what’s happening in each scene and
quickly grow tiresome. Had they not been so overused, the message could have
been more powerful. That said, the films decidedly quiet and anticlimactic
ending, does deliver a brilliant tirade from Pitt’s character, comparing
America to nothing more than a giant corporation, giving us what deserves to
become one of those classic, often misquoted lines.
Overt political messages aside, the story itself is simple
but layered, as one screw up after another give a sense that the whole mess
will never be fixed. The main strength of the movie is the acting. Brad Pitt
delivers what is probably his best performance since Jesse James, recalling the
laconic slow drawl and world weary demeanour of his western anti-hero. Here he
manages to make his character surprisingly likable despite little back story;
he has a dislike for violence, preferring to kill people ‘softly’. Ray Liotta gives a great performance as the
shaky mobster at the heart of the mess and James Gandolfini delivers a
memorable turn as an overweight alcoholic hit man, ruminate over past lover
affairs.
Overall, this is a mean, well acted, violent slice of crime
cinema. While its doesn’t have much new to say about America and is not as
meaningful as it would like to think it is, it’s certainly stylish and entertaining enough for fans of
crime movies, who like a film which doesn’t feel the need to rush to its
conclusion. While by no means a classic, Pitts performance is worth the
admission price alone.
