Killing Them Softly (2012)

If you’re a good filmmaker, in all likelihood you want your art to be about much more than what’s on the screen. You want your movie to actually mean something. The question then becomes: how obvious should these deeper messages be? You could always go the route of The Master, which was so startlingly opaque that some people left the theater scratching their heads. Watching that movie, the audience has to do all the work. Andrew Dominik’s new crime drama Killing Them Softly goes in the exact opposite direction and chooses to run away from subtlety at every opportunity. This is the kind of film that plays Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” on the soundtrack when Brad Pitt’s cold-blooded assassin character first enters the picture at the end of act one, and that winds up being one of Dominik’s more low-key choices. There’s some very skilled filmmaking to be seen here, but it’s all nullified by Dominik’s insistence on shouting his message at you every five seconds. These characters aren’t real people. They’re the filmmaker's puppets.

Killing Them Softly also makes the mistake of peaking too early, thanks to a breathtaking robbery sequence in which a couple of lowlifes (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) rob a card game hosted by gangster Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). They believe they can get away with this because Trattman previously robbed the game himself, and he would seem to be suspect number one if it were to happen again. After the robbery, hitman Jackie Cogan (Pitt) is brought in to clean up the mess. This involves killing both the robbers, the man who ordered the robbery, and Trattman just for the sake of calming the mob community down. These two robbers disrupted the status quo, and now it needs to be cleaned up through a series of calculated but brutal murders.

The film also happens to be set in the autumn of 2008, when the United States was just about to elect Barack Obama as President and the economy had just sank like the Titanic. Dominik sees several parallels between the United States in ’08 and the story he is telling, and he is happy to remind the audience of them every 30 seconds or so. Dominik’s universe is one in which every character is perpetually watching the news or listening to it on the radio, and thus Killing Them Softly is almost exclusively soundtracked by speeches from George W. Bush, Obama and John McCain. He throws this at us right from the start, as one of the very first shots features a character standing in the shadow of competing McCain and Obama billboards. Dominik amps up the subtext to a degree so ridiculous that it ceases to be subtext.

This might have been forgivable if the final two-thirds of the movie had enough going on in the foreground to atone for this irritation, but once the robbery comes to an end Killing Them Softly settles into a conversational groove and is never able to recapture the thrills that came early. Dominik clearly knows his way around the camera, and the film certainly looks and feels like a really good movie in fits and starts. I admire what he is trying to do here, and it’s a minor miracle that a movie this unrelentingly bleak, cold and unsatisfying was able to get a wide release. (It’s less surprising that it didn’t make very much money at all, and audiences apparently hated it.) There’s no traditional narrative to be found here, but that is not inherently a bad thing. The problem is Dominik doesn’t realize that half the joy of a film like this is that we’re supposed to do some thinking and deciphering for ourselves. Instead he bludgeons us with his "messages" and "themes" until ultimately there’s no more thinking to be done. You can deal with thematics all you want, but when you bring it all to the surface this often there ceases to be any real depth.

Consequently, it’s just not that fun of a movie to watch. The final scene is less of a catharsis than a thesis statement, and by that point Dominik is done pretending that anyone in his film is supposed to resemble an actual gangster. This resolution (if you want to call it that) features two of the film’s most prominent characters talking at a bar about the events of the film while Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech blares in the background. At this point, the two men stop talking like gangsters and start talking like two political science majors trying to one-up each other. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against political science majors. I know several of them.) Whether or not you like the movie as a whole will hinge on your reaction to that scene, and I—like many, it seems—was rolling my eyes. Dominik is good at so many things, and there are many sequences in Killing Them Softly that are downright exhilarating. Unfortunately, everything else is suffocating. Dominik would have been better off just telling his story, and letting the audience figure out just what it all means. That’s what the best movies do.

Grade: C+