Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly is not an easy film to watch. It’s 97 minutes are filled with profanity of the highest order, crime (both petty and organised), explicit drug abuse and huge amounts of very graphic violence. However, if you can look past all that, you will find one of the most well-paced, and enjoyable cynical films of the year.

Andrew Dominik’s third feature (following 2000’s impressive ‘Chopper’ and 2007’s beautiful ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’) premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film festival where it was met with much acclaim. The story is simple and has almost certainly been told before – the catalyst is the holding up of an illegal card game by small time junkies Frankie (McNairy) and Russell (Mendelsohn), for which Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) is then framed. The rest of the film follows Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) after he gets called in to sort the whole mess out.

Killing excels in its pacing – this is certainly one of Andrew Dominik’s strengths as a filmmaker; every scene is a perfect vignette and stands up on its own as well complimenting the film as a whole. This is helped by some pitch perfect performances. The whole cast are on top form, in particular Pitt who somehow crafts a likeable moralist of mass-murder Jackie Cogan, who is brutal but fair in his serving of just desserts. But the stand out for me has to be James Gandolfini as the utterly abhorrent Mickey – despite only appearing in a couple of scenes, his sleazy alcoholic is fascinatingly disgusting and sticks in the mind long after he disappears from the screen.

The soundtrack too, is perfectly judged; from James Wilsey’s fantastic cover of Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, which is used to introduce Jackie Cogan, to the appropriately placed Heroin by The Velvet Underground.

{{ quote Killing Them Softly is the most succinct and poetically political film I’ve seen all year.}}

The film is beautifully shot by Greg Fraser in dreary greys, dirty yellows and jet-blacks. Fraser captures the characters’ grimy under-world in a suitably nasty light, and yet allows occasional, perverse beauty to shine through – a notable example of which is a drive-by hit by Cogan which is slowed to rain-drop speed and plays out like a ballet of bloodshed.

But actually none of this is relevant. The film is not really gangster film and it’s not simply a showcase of talent. It is not about the story, nor is it about exposing a world of profanities, violence and drugs.

The clue to the film’s real agenda is in its soundscape of television and radio snippets featuring George W. Bush and Barack Obama battling it out on the eve of the 2008 presidential election and specifically talking about the economy. It very quickly becomes clear that the film is actually an artful critique of capitalism and a comment on the current economic climate. Once this becomes apparent, seemingly incidental scenes (like Mickey’s drunken monologue about prostitutes to Cogan, or one in which the fees and expenses of doing a hit are discussed) suddenly take on huge significance.

Each character can be read as representative of certain financial institutions or ideologies. And the films last line fully deserves to stand alongside Gordon Gecko’s ‘Greed is good’ speech and become a classic in film history.

Killing Them Softly is the most succinct and poetically political film I’ve seen all year and is, in my opinion, the year’s first masterpiece.

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