Killing Them Softly
★★★★
(2012)
Andrew Dominick's near perfect The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford saw him stretching his legs 7 years after his debut Aussie classic Chopper, enriching and thickening the fog between the myth and the truth. Killing Them Softy sits neatly somewhere in between; an urban western or a suburban modern gangster film, which ever you prefer. Dominick's own adaptation of George V Higgins' Cogan's Trade is transposed to an unnamed city 2008 and repetitively uses the US election being fought at the time to punctuate its tense conversations to mesmerising effect.
Brad Pitt, plays Jackie Cogan, a "cleaner"; a squeamish hitman who pegs his targets softly from afar because the complications of knowing the people he must kill for money are too much for him to bare. After a poker game heist by small time crooks Frankie and Russel (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendolshon) Cogan is called in to clean up by an unnamed money man played coolly by Richard Jenkins. Our robbers disappear and Cogan hits the streets, brings in some help in the rather large form of James Gandolfini's depressive psycho Mickey and sets about doing his dirty job.
Dominick conducts Killing Them Softly with a beautiful loud/quiet approach, hinted at by its seriously brilliant credit sequence. As we follow McNairy's Frankie through a tunnel into the light of the day the droning sound punctuates and disappears, violently pulling us between beautiful images and political voice over. Though most of the film hinges on painful, sad and often very funny conversations usually by only two people, its violent scenes are hammered home. One murder plays out like a slow gruesome ballet while another forces Cogan to break his rule of distance.
As quiet and strong as Pitt, Gandolfini and Jenkins are in the film it's McNairy and Mendolshon who steal the show. Mendelshon's Australian junkie Russel, the spanner in the works here, is a brilliant dirty piece of work. As one of today's most underrated actors he excels once again, only to be pipped at the post by a whining murmuring McNairy, hot off another dazzling performance in Ben Affleck's Argo. The two actors own the first half of the film, revelling in the quiet tension of their robbery scene and bantering before and after like hyperactive bandits from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or straight off the pages of some fast Elmore Leonard novel.
The constant battering of background noise from Bush and Obama among others has rubbed some people up the wrong way but it cleverly puts a cap on the films cynical finale, which spits acid in the face of Obama's new America and is quietly, softly if you will, one of the most resonant and unique comments of the financial crisis in recent memory. Killing Them Softly is a beautifully made, wittily scripted, seriously acted film and Dominick easily makes it three out of three.
