Killing Them Softly: Cannes Review
The Bottom Line
A tasty modern crime yarn with political overtones, Brad Pitt and an over-weaning sense of style.
Venue
Cannes Film Festival (in Competition)
Opens
September 21 (The Weinstein Company)
Director
Andrew Dominik
Cast
Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelson, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Vincent Caratola, Slaine, Max Casella,
A juicy, bloody, grimy and profane crime drama that amply satisfies as a deep-dish genre piece, Killing Them Softly rather insistently also wants to be something more.
Writer-director Andrew Dominik, whose extraordinary Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford proved too long and arty for the masses, repositions George V. Higgins 1974 Boston mob-world novel as a metaphor for the ills of American capitalism circa 2008, a neatly provocative tact. But he also shamelessly shows off his directorial acumen; unlike the leading character, whos all business, Dominik makes sure you notice all his moves. Tight, absorbing and entertainingly performed by a virtually all-male cast topped by Brad Pitt, this Weinstein Co. release should generate solid mid-level business this fall.
A lawyer, professor and assistant U.S. Attorney who long investigated organized crime in addition to writing 27 novels, Higgins knew well of what he wrote. His first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was made into a fine film and his third, Cogans Trade, the basis of this one, consists of torrents of excep! tionally vivid Beantown wiseguy dialogue with bits of plot tucked almost incidentally into the chatter.
Moving the action to decimated post-Katrina New Orleans without a tourist in sight, Dominik has done a keen, disciplined job of coaxing the plot out of the shadows while retaining the flavor of underclass lingo and attitude. With the background dominated by then-presidential candidate Barack Obamas optimistic speeches stressing the availability of the American promise to all, some bottom-feeding crims plot what looks like a no-risk scheme: Old-timer Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola, the great Johnny Sak of The Sopranos) hires unwashed kids Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to raid the regular card night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who once robbed his own game and got away with it.
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While allowing these low-enders to emerge in all their miserable glory, Dominik also adds his own flourishes right from the outset, from striking lateral camera moves to amusingly supplying one of the young hoods a pathetic little dog. Despite their general ineptitude, the boys pull off the job, but this is bad news for Markie, as its going to be assumed hes run the same scam a second time.
At least this is what is suspected by the unnamed and unseen corporate mob, which has cog-in-the-system Driver (Richard Jenkins) engage shrewd hit man Jackie Cogan (Pitt) to deal with this disruption of business as usual. Needlessly, Markie gets horribly beat up, Cogan brings in another hired killer, Mickey (James Gandolfini) to help him with a double-killing, and plenty more blood gets spilled before order is, after a fashion, restored.
Although the plot bases are dutifully, if briefly, covered, this is a crime story like ! so many others in which it doesnt really matter if you can follow who everyone is and why awful things are happening to them; its basically a given that everyone on view is guilty of something, so you cant feel too badly when they come to grisly ends.
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What matter more are style and attitude, which Dominik ladles on like sauce on ribs. Russells drug-addled disorientation is represented by multiple distortions of time, visual perception and sound; the pursuit of one victim is imaginatively covered entirely from the outside of the building in which the chase is consummated; Cogan arrives on the scene to the accompaniment of Johnny Cashs The Man Comes Around; the just-scraping-by 21st century hoods drive late-60s/early-70s cars like a Riviera and Toronado; and one mans execution is rendered from many angles in a slow-motion explosion of breaking glass and penetrating bullets so elaborate and prolonged that it resembles a self-standing art installation.
In a related way, some of the dialogue scenes, especially a couple of near-monologues superbly delivered by Gandolfini as a booze-guzzling, sex-obsessed, past-his-prime hit man, almost have the feel of brilliant, free-standing acting class scenes; they serve the films purposes, to be sure, but theres a self-consciously showy aspect to them that makes you easily imagine students using them as audition pieces.
The film is terribly smart in every respect, with neer-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom, but it never lets you forget it, from Pitts pithy excoriation of Thomas Jeffersons hypocrisy right down to his Crime is the business of America final line that is bound to be widely quoted.
The film noir crime dramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s were about a palpable unease in the country, but this remained a subtext rather t! han the overt subject of the films. Here, Dominik explicitly articulates his intended meanings, which have to do with money, institutional rot and what happens when you dont keep your economic house in order. Either approach is valid but, perhaps in this day and age, audiences need their messages to be quick and direct. Killing Them Softly delivers them that way.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (in competition)
Opens: Friday, Sept. 21 (The Weinstein Co,)
Production: Plan B, Chockstone Pictures
Cast: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Vincent Caratola, Slaine, Max Casella, Trevor Long, Sam Shepard
Director: Andrew Dominik
Screenwriter: Andrew Dominik, based on the novel Cogans Trade by George V. Higgins
Producers: Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz, Anthony Katagas
Executive producers: Megan Ellison, Matt Butan, Bill Johnson, Jim Seibel, Adi Shankar, Spencer Silna
Director of photography: Greig Fraser
Production and costume designer: Patricia Norris
Editor: Brian A. Kates
No rating, 97 minutes.
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