Killing Them Softly

That was certainly grim, unpleasant, brutal, and depressing — I thought it was great. This is one of those films where almost nothing you are seeing really correlates to what the film is about. On the one hand, as the plot synopsis indicates, hitman Brad Pitt is dispatched to clean up the fallout from the robbery of a mob-protected poker game. This is how the film was, and is, marketed. There are hoods, hookers, hitmen, and dopeheads. There are beatings and several very grisly murders, as well as a relatively constant back-burner of simmering violence. Like other recent-ish films about these sorts of topics, there is even some use of soundtracked songs that are tangentially related to what is on screen. None of this is not what ‘Killing Them Softly’ is about. Writer/director Andrew Dominik has taken a 1974 crime novel (by George V Higgins) and made it an allegory for the 2007-8 financial crisis, specifically as it relates to the US markets. I’ve not read the novel but it seems that Dominik’s script is pretty faithful, rather that he’s added a veneer of economics to the proceedings. As it is, characters don’t so much speak as monologue at each other, their heightened dialogue serving more as exegesis than interaction. They, and the events in which they participate, are presented as stand-ins for, among other things mortgage-backed securities (the mob poker games), the housing market crash (a side-story involving dog-napping), an ineffectual and slow-moving government (the unseen ‘consortium’ represented by the driver/counselor), and so on. This is all presented, again exclusively in the realm of low-level criminals, alongside newsreel footage on television and in radio broadcasts (in cars, bars, airports, really everywhere) of then-President Bush Jr and campaigning soon-to-be President Obama speaking on the ongoing economic disaster. Which brings us to the real question, does the film work? For the public, as a quote gangster unquote film, seemingly not. Apparently, audiences hated it. It didn’t bomb exactly, but it does seem to have sent Dominik back to directing music videos (and documentaries) for a while, before re-emerging with ‘Blonde’ last year (which I’ve not seen, but which audiences haven’t really taken to either). It is slow and talky, tonally very dark, visually ugly (on purpose), and the expected tropes are very intermittent. Strictly on the surface level, I don’t mind this at all and it’s nice to see a distinctly UNglorified version of this substrata of culture after all of your Godfathers, and Good Fellas, and whatever. So then, does the economics view work in and of itself and, perhaps more importantly, does this make for a film anyone would be pleased to have seen? Allegories are tricky, particularly when you are not told (directly or otherwise) that they are going to be allegories from the outset. How much one recalls of the US in this time period will obviously inform how much background is already in place to recognize what’s happening. Going in cold, with either no knowledge or no recollection will likely make this a more difficult film to appreciate, but even a cursory memory of it will help a lot. While I didn’t make a study of the period, I lived through it, I was aware, in headline terms, of the issues, and I’ve seen things like ‘The Big Short’ and ‘Margin Call’ (both of which are about aspects of the same crisis); I suspect many others have about that much foreknowledge and/or saw at least one of those films which may be enough of a grounding to indict that what is presented here is, in fact, what happened, albeit on a much more macro-level. I think that if you do then yes, this film works. And if it does for you, I suspect you will like it rather more than you might think. I suspect most audiences didn’t see what they thought they’d been promised, while others may have been turned off by the relentlessly downbeat nature and occasional graphic violence. But I genuinely think that this is a remarkable film that’s been unjustly overlooked.