Review: Killing Them Softly

Indian Express Rating:**1/2

BASED on George V Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade centred in the 1970s,Killing Them Softly would like to believe it has reinvented that story about recession and the mob to fit into these uncertain economic times. “Would like to” being the operative word. Apart from a series of speeches running in the background,by then President George W Bush,then Democratic candidate Barack Obama,and then experts wringing their hands about the financial mess that was America,all Killing Them Softly have are rather broad strokes comparing the two situations.

So we have a jibe at the “corporate-like structure” that now marks the mob,with decisions being put off in the name of consulations. And we have a jibe at it being squeamish about getting its hands dirty though not so much about squeezing the last dime out of those who do so. And then there is the rather desperate jibe at how somebody needs to be seen as having been punished so that the show can go on. Last of all there is Brad Pitt,the guy actually doing the dirty work,who says he likes to kill them from a distance,”Kill them softly”,not getting too “touchy,feely” with his victims to avoid their desperate appeals to him to spare their lives — before proceeding to shoot them quite brutally and in slow-motion,choreographed violence.

Killing Them Softly by director Andrew Dominik indeed seems more inspired by the Quentin Tarantino school of gangster films where they talk as much as they shoot. Here though while they talk,the dialogues come nowhere as close to the ludicrously compelling art of Tarantino. The conversations here are a series of dialogues punctuated by abuses,and in accents that are confusing,hard-to-follow and at times completely lose you.

Dominik’s deftness,on the other hand,is visible in the way he paints the bleakness of the scenario and gets the small roles to stand out,from Scott McNairy as a nervous hoodlum who has been talked into looting a mob poker game; from the Ray Liotta of yore who finds himself caught in the middle of a mess that for once isn’t of his making; from the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins who doesn’t ever get off a chair in the entire film; and most of all,from James Gandolfini of The Sopranos,who in his decadence and denial best conveys the hopelessness that Killing Them Softly is aiming for.

Where Dominik,who also directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,also gets right is in the soundtrack — from ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ to ‘When the Man Comes Around’,the songs convey better what the film struggles to.

Pitt,who has been hired by the mob to track down those that robbed its poker game and kill them,gets in one line that is supposed to make it all right. As Obama delivers his speech about Thomas Jefferson and all men being created equal,he refers to the latter’s half-Black kids,and says: “You want to tell me we are one big community? That’s bulls…. I live in America,and America is not a country,it’s a business.” That’s as good as it gets.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com