Brad Pitt plays a hitman in this brilliant thriller, updated from a 70s crime novel to the America of 2008 at a political crossroads
With Killing Them Softly the Australian writer-director Andrew Dominik confirms his reputation as a film-maker of great confidence with a steady eye and a sharp focus on what to date is a single subject: crime as a way of life. His first picture, Chopper, made 12 years ago, was a portrait of the notorious Mark "Chopper" Read, a psychopathic criminal, terrifyingly impersonated by Eric Bana, who became some sort of national hero in Australia as a bestselling author and a media celebrity. Dominik, however, expected audiences to bring too much with them in the way of existing knowledge of the man and his background. As a result, for British moviegoers at least, the film, though gripping, took place in a social vacuum.
There was no such problem with his second picture, made seven years later, a masterly re-examination of a familiar American legend. In the western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Dominik took a cool, measured look at the celebrated post-civil war outlaw and the young follower whose admiration developed into a bizarre hatred. In both pictures he showed a fascination for the way his characters talked and addressed their world – the colourful Australian vernacular of the criminals in Chopper, the formal vocabulary of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in Jesse James.
These interests are carried on in Killing Them Softly, which is closely based on Cogan's Trade, a 1974 novel by George V Higgins, a prolific author of crime fiction, most of it now out of print. Dominik came across Higgins as a result of catching a TV screening of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a bleak, downbeat movie based on his first novel which starred Robert Mitchum at his most vulnerable as a petty Irish-American crook exploited by smarter hoodlums and unscrupulous cops. It's the only film, I believe, to be based on a Higgins book.
Higgins, who died in 1999 aged 60, was an assistant US attorney for Massachusetts when The Friends of Eddie Coyle appeared in 1970. It became an immediate success as a result of such encomia as Ross Macdonald calling it "the most powerful and frightening crime novel I have read this year", and Norman Mailer opining: "What dialogue… What I can't get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz." Nearly all Higgins's characters are male Irish-American crooks and law enforcers who drive around Boston or sit in bars, talking endlessly, colourfully, obscenely, cryptically, about their lives, their work, their dreams. His books are virtually plays, their pared down narration reading like stage directions by Hemingway. Writing about his second novel in 1973, I said he belonged in the company of Hammett and Chandler. But re-evaluating him today in terms of Jorge Luis Borges's claim that "each writer creates his precursors", I see him as the forerunner of David Mamet and Elmore Leonard. Anyway, Higgins is fortunate to have been rediscovered by Dominik, and Dominik is lucky to have found him.
Killing Them Softly is the story of a heist that goes wrong. Two noisome low-lifes just out of jail are hired by an ambitious minor criminal ("we're not the very smartest guys in the world," he rightly observes) to rob a backroom poker school with the intention of framing another guy for the job. They succeed in an edgily mounted robbery that is all menace and suspense but no violence. The Mob, however, have an interest in protecting such businesses and dispatch a fastidious middle-class lawyer (Richard Jenkins) to handle matters. He hires the smart hitman Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt, who played Jesse James in Dominik's second film) to track down the miscreants. The film unfolds in a succession of dialogues in bars and cars, a good many of the lines coming directly from Higgins and all of them in his style. They're brilliantly delivered by as fine a cast as Hollywood has assembled since the film of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. It's all far sadder and far funnier than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with the characters using language as a form of armour and weaponry, only occasionally saying precisely what they mean. The stylised, brilliantly turned exchanges are punctuated by often stunningly staged outbursts of violence, including one particular killing in slow motion that makes us feel we're spectators at the apocalypse.
Dominik effects a couple of major changes to Higgins's text. First he removes the action from Boston to a grim, rain-drenched unnamed American city. (It was shot in and around New Orleans but there's nothing particularly southern about it.) Second, he sets it very specifically in 2008, and the political and moral context is a nation in a state of economic crisis with an idealistic man constantly on radio and TV using a stale, overheated rhetoric to bring Americans together to face these challenges as a united democratic community.
The film's characters are at best ambivalent to these events. At worst they mock them consciously or indirectly. Jackie Cogan, the movie's dominant figure, takes the express position that since the days of the Founding Fathers, America has been a nation of selfish, self-seeking individuals, and that the country's business is business. As the suave lawyer who bankrolls the heist in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (a film made 17 years before Dominik was born) puts it: "After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavour."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/23/killing-them-softly-brad-pitt
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