Retro Rebeller: Killing Them Softly is the most literal gangster film ever.
Andrew Dominik's gangster noir, set in the wake of Barack Obama's election victory, is unsubtle in every way imaginable. That is why it's great.
Welcome to Retro Rebeller, a new feature from this newsletter. For a while I have been a prolific writer for the website Rebeller Media, which has since disintegrated and much of its public archive is gone. I have pitched and written many articles to an outlet that dares to be cutting-edge, even if that went over the board. So now, I am sharing some of my pieces, with permission from the previous editor, and giving them the space that it deserves. Some have been republished on Splice Today, and one has been published in Quillette. It is free to read, and I mention this because you would have to go through the paywall in order to access Rebeller Media at the time. If you like to support this newsletter or access any pieces that I have paywalled, subscribe now.
Killing Them Softly is unsubtle, in your face and takes the tropes of the gangster movie very literally. It is now ten years old as of writing this, and with the release of Andrew Dominik’s subsequent effort Blonde, I thought it would be appropriate to release this piece. I think this was a favourite of mine when I wrote a frequent column for Rebeller of films that received the dreaded F grade by Cinemascore. This was the first instalment and if the site went longer than it did, the column would have had a greater lifespan.
Cinemascore is the flimsy answer to the question “what happens if the voice of the audience matters more than the critical consensus?” When a movie is released on its opening day, theatres across North America provide ballots to audience members about their reactions. Demographic data, an interest in renting the film and why you went to see it determines their reaction and the numbers that paid for a ticket averaged out. Derived from a marketing firm based in Las Vegas, Cinemascore puts a priority on commerce over art. The way it measures how the average joe watches a movie is derived from their expectations being met and shaped by attracting them to the movie, rather than a comprehension of cinematic language. Nevertheless, it serves as a reliable metric for studios to understand what kind of movies are worth promoting and how they push them to gain maximal box office returns.
It’s rare for a movie to score an F grade. As of writing this, only 19 films have gotten the (dis) honour of earning the lowest grade in existence. But an F grade usually means box office poison. Ed Mintz, the founder of Cinemascore states that movies that receive Ds or Fs meant that they shouldn’t have been made in the first place, or “they promoted it funny and received the wrong crowd.” They may entice based on the lavish cast, a trailer that’s entirely different from the content, or that simply the audience is not yet ready for that kind of filmmaking.
Andrew Dominik has only directed three features in his career, all of which test the limits of criminal culture. He debuts with the home-grown Chopper, a marvellous character study of the infamous Australian convict Mark Chopper Read, featuring a breakthrough performance from Eric Bana. Dominik then followed up with The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, which stars Brad Pitt and Casy Affleck is about the limits of worshipping a villain. His third Killing Them Softly is relatively minor, and with an ensemble cast as star-studded and camerawork so exquisitely beautiful, that this could have established him as a critical darling with enough of a distinct vision.
Adapted from the George V Higgins novel Cogan’s Trade, it centres around Jackie Cogan, (Brad Pitt) a hitman who has to investigate a botched robbery of a poker game. That robbery is made by many culprits, most of whom are dumb or have past their prime. Rounding out the cast are James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta reprising the mob roles that made them recognizable in the first place. The trailers hint at a testosterone-fueled crime saga that could serve as a return to form for these actors. Instead, they get the same genre exercise that preaches about American decline.
Killing Them Softly drastically changes the backdrop from its pulp source, yet faithfully follows each page. It switches the setting of the 1970s with the global financial crisis of 2008, mere days before Barack Obama was elected as the new President and it’s more than a coincidence that it was shot in New Orleans, rather than New England. This transforms the film into an explicit indictment of crony capitalism, taken to its most literal form. But that was also the premise of Cogan’s Trade, where middle management of mob elites so narcissistic and trapped in their indulgences, they have little energy to carry out the work, instead letting their foot soldiers, quite possibly dumber than rocks, do it for them.
When the film premiered at Cannes, earlier reviews were more than positive. Todd McCarthy from the Hollywood Reporter, called it “terribly smart in every aspect” and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was ecstatic giving it a perfect five stars. The reception was more mixed when it got released. Roger Ebert’s review praised the performances, but criticized it for “having seen versions of this story forever.” Kurt Loder of Reason, labelled it a “talky noir with a political agenda”, which represents the film’s word of mouth in a nutshell. The film made $6.8 million in its opening weekend, coming in third against Skyfall, the final instalment of the Twilight franchise and Lincoln. But overall, it returned twice back of its $15 million budget.
Killing Them Softly is harshly critical of the empty political rhetoric of the times bellowed by politicians, while their constituents below them live through intense economic stress. As a man trawls through windy garbage as Barack Obama campaigned for President, the credits disrupt the speech, implying little substance when he speaks. It finishes ferociously with him delivering his victory speech at a bar where Cogan tells the Driver to pay up, after a long day of work.
Noir and gangster films have always used capitalism as a crutch for one main reason: every character is talking about money as something to be pursued and taken, always at the expense of other people and often out of desperation. Killing Them Softly asks what happens if everyone lost and the only hope is to withstand the cruel nature of financial anxiety. One character mentions a robbery of a poker game to be an “economic fucking collapse”, where the players lost all of their cash because Mark Trautman (Ray Liotta) chose to screw them over for his own amusement.
Largely dialogue-driven, the tension throughout the film lies in the relationship between the gangsters. Cogan is typically stoic, often cutting out the bullshit of every man he meets. But whenever he comes across anyone’s self-pity, Brad Pitt’s face absorbs it, emitting a subtle disgust against the system he’s succumbed to. When he meets James Gandolfini’s New York Mickey, a fellow hitman who just got paroled and is now indulging in alcohol and hookers, there’s a sense that they are exhausted. As he hears about the events surrounding the robbery, he pontificates how calculated the beatings are, before saying how he likes to kill them softly, without any emotional distance.
Andrew Dominik takes character actors such as Liotta and Gandolfini and put them not in the spotlight, but in the shadows, asking his audience to imagine them after they reach their peak. What if Tony Soprano could not solve his own demons after his marriage with Carmella falls apart? What happens once Henry Hill went into Witness Protection? The answer is a tragic one of declining trust. They had fucked up and crossed the line, and in the past, we only took it for granted because they were once good at what they do. And if they can’t do the work, then they pass it on to a duo (played by Ben Mendelsohn and Scott McNairy) who believe that wearing clean gloves with a sawed-off shotgun is an appropriate way to pull off a casino robbery.
After the film, there is a trend of films that becomes open to using the global financial crisis as a backdrop, and a growing fear of displacement. Hell or High Water, The Mule, Hustlers, and even Dragged Across Concrete, reveals that the impact of the recession is still felt by many Americans. By bringing attention to Liotta and Gandolfini, Killing Them Softly was slained simply because it’s a victim of its own irony. It flirts nostalgically with the roles that made those actors famous when the critique is that these people are stuck in their own hubris. And the only remedy is they die alone or are slained by another person. You don’t feel bad for them because this is America, which simply operates like a business. That’s perhaps the bleakest statement any crime film could make throughout this decade.