Butler's Cinema Scene

“KILLING THEM SOFTLY”  My rating: B

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Killing Them Softly” has the grimmest world view of any film since Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.”

The difference is that despite destroying the Earth in the last scene, the pessimistic Von Trier found tremendous beauty on this spinning rock.

“Killing Them Softly,” on the other hand, is a jaundiced wallow in greed and corruption, a gritty and deliberately ugly tale of crime and consequences that evokes grim laughter but leaves behind the bitter taste of bile.

Based on a novel by prosecutor-turned-writer George V. Higgins (whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle became a brilliant crime film in 1973), this effort from Aussie auteur Andrew Dominik is so brutal as  to be shocking even to jaded contemporary sensibilities. Yet you can’t call it exploitative or cheap.

Our hero (the word is used advisedly) is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a mob enforcer  dispatched to post-Katrina New Orleans to clean up a mess.

Three oily (literally…they seem to sweat 10W-40) criminals (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Vincent Curatola) have robbed an illegal poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta).  A few years earlier Markie arranged the robbery of his own game, a bit of outside-the-box thinking that earned begrudging admiration from his fellow lowlifes.

Of course, you can only pull off that sort of thing once, and that’s what the three mooks behind  this new crime are counting on. In the wake of yet another robbery everyone will assume Markie is going for a perfecta. The presumption of guilt will fall on him, allowing a clean getaway for the true perps.

Except that the lethally laid-back Cogan isn’t falling for that. He knows that Markie is too smart to pull the same stunt again. Problem is, everybody else is thick as a brick.  All the gamblers in town assumes Markie is the bad guy, and to keep peace in the valley Markie – even if he’s innocent – must be made an example.

Cogan’s efforts to kill Markie and locate the true robbers are the spine of  “Killing Them Softly’s” narrative. But writer/director Dominik (his previous film was the criminally underappreciated “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” also with Pitt ) doesn’t mind slowing down the proceedings for long, loquacious, Tarantino-esque exchanges of dialogue with the sort of eloquent, comic Shakespearean swearing pioneered in HBO’s “Deadwood.”

The best of these set pieces are reserved for James Gandolfini as Mickey, another out-of-town hitter called in because Cogan knows and likes Markie and doesn’t want to  personally pull the trigger on him.

“They cry, they plead, they beg, they piss themselves, they cry for their mothers. It gets embarrassing,” Cogan explains. “I like to kill ’em softly. From a distance.”

It quickly becomes apparent that  Mickey is using this trip to the Big Easy as an excuse to drink and whore to excess. All too soon  Cogan concludes that his old pal is not up to completing his assignment.

But few on-screen moments this year have delivered as much wicked pleasure as Gandolfini ramblings about the wife who’s probably going to leave him and the joys of strange.

“There’s no ass in the entire world like a young Jewish girl who’s hookin’,”  he enthuses to an appalled/amused Cogan. (That line also suggests the generally un-PC atmosphere in which this film unreels.)

But Gandofini’s is just one of several noteworthy performances here. Pitt’s Cogan is terrific, with the wry charm of John Travolta’s Chili Palmer and the quiet menace of an executioner.

Liotta, who has played more than his share of unlikeable, sleazy characters, almost has us rooting for the hapless Markie.

Richard Jenkins is very good as a weary-eyed mob lawyer who serves as Cogan’s go-between. This well-dressed shyster finds himself regretting both the violence of his world and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the mob itself, with too many damn committees hemming and hawing over important decisions.

And the three dumb-as-dirt robbers are an absolute hoot.

There are a couple of first-rate set pieces. One offers the most evocative visual depiction of a heroin rush ever captured on film. The other is a violent hit captured in ultra slow-mo, with ejected shell casings doing a graceful airborne ballet, window glass exploding like a deadly kaleidoscope and plumes of gore rising like a erupting lava.

On the other hand, one real-time gangland beating is so horrendous that you may find an excuse to retie your shoelaces. Anything not to look at the savagery unfolding before us.

My one major caveat is that Domink, in trying to  pump up the film’s subtext about organized crime being a natural extension of America’s corporate mentality, lays it on too thick. The film opens with a recording of a speech by Barack Obama, and periodically the proceedings unfold  to the accompaniment of political oratory from Obama and George W. Bush (the film is set in 2008).

The not-so-subtle implication is that a killing in the market and the literal killing of a human being are pretty much the same thing here in the good old U.S.A.

I think I prefer Cogan’s observation that “America is not a country. It’s a business.”

It’s an entire philosophy in eight words. And nobody gets out with their hands clean.

 | Robert W. Butler