Killing softly, telling thuddingly, showing inventively

It opens with a series of unnerving stutters, crosscutting between the credits—silent, stark, white on black—and images of greasy hoodlum Frank (Scoot McNairy) exiting a darkened building for the sodden daylight of some profoundly rundown US city while one Senator Obama fills the soundtrack with something about “the American promise of life.” As Killing Them Softly ambles toward its flamboyantly cynical conclusion, the city becomes only more a shambles of windblown refuse and houses collapsing in slow motion, Frank and his colleagues become only more hunched with fear, and the broadcasts of speeches made by Obama and Bush that follow the characters everywhere they go become only more redolent of a distinctly American combination of stoic apologia and unconvincing optimism. The story is set in 2008, only four years ago, though this is very much a period piece, with the financial crisis and swap of presidents functioning as an increasingly overstated counterpoint to the film’s seedy milieu of robbery, gambling, dope and murder. The plot is unremarkably generic, featuring a heist followed by a series of killings. But Killing Them Softly isn’t about its plot.

New Zealand director Andrew Dominik’s previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was so tailored for my personal tastes that I resented it. A downbeat western following a fascinatingly strange historical trajectory and high on atmospheres derivative of Terrence Malick, Jesse James struck me as pandering. It kept getting in its own way with precious stylistics. The funny thing about Killing Me Softly is that something like the reverse of Jesse James’ problem has happened. The film’s One Big Idea—“America’s not a country, it's a business,” goes the penultimate line of dialogue—is ultimately far too simplistic to sustain such an incessant refrain as it gets treated to here in scene after scene. Yet Dominik’s determination to impart a directorial signature actually complicates his message in some truly engaging ways. That arresting opening described above is complimented by a bravura, tension-filled sequence in which Frank and an Australian junky, glistening with about six weeks worth of sweat, rob a poker game populated by mafia; by a drug-taking scene built from woozy push-ins and gauzy flickers of amber light; by an assassination scene slowed down to such a glacial frame rate that the victim’s head turns a windshield into a spider web one crack at a time.

And the stylistic gambles aren’t just to do with sound effects and vision. Dominik’s screenplay, an updated adaption of George V. Higgin’s Coogan’s Trade, makes room for an absorbing series of extended monologues—most memorable are those made by James Gandolfini’s aging, groggy, sex-and-booze addicted hitman—riddled with anxiety, rampant misogyny, self-pity and squeamishness. Quentin Tarantino made talky crime films into a subgenre, but Dominik’s is a different variety of verbose thug. All the characters in Killing Me Softly are men, and all are repugnant in the extreme—who cares about these scumbags? But get them talking for a while, and you find that you want to hear more.

So take this as a wary recommendation. Killing Me Softly is at once painfully obvious yet, somehow, captivating. The cast is uniformly marvelous, with a great supporting turn from Richard Jenkins doing mob middle management, and yes, Brad Pitt, a character actor who just happens to be very handsome, as the most sensible assassin of the bunch. He’s something of a softie when it comes to killing, but he understands the bottom line. The film’s final words? “So fucking pay me!”

    

Eat Pray Love: JR tours the globe in search of Enlightenment Lite

In her Washington Post review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Grace Lichtenstein quipped that the only thing wrong with Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.” Lichtenstein misread the book. It’s actually a Julia Roberts movie. It is very much a Julia Roberts movie.

Roberts is ten years older than Gilbert was in her memoir, and this might contribute to the some of what feels off in the comma-excised adaptation of Eat Pray Love, directed by Ryan Murphy, who seems drawn to best-selling memoirs in which privileged people quench their spiritual thirst by trying on alternative lifestyles. Roberts is very youthful and still adorable, but it’s to Roberts’ credit as a human that her Liz seems like she should be a lot smarter by this point in life. Marital disharmony to Billy Crudup sends Liz to prayer, self-help books, and James Franco’s cutie-pie actor, which is how we discover that Gilbert’s also the author of one of the worst plays in the English language.

When none of those remedies serve, the next step is travel—lots of it. Liz’s tours of Italy, Calcutta and Bali hit on each of the titular verbs, though Gilbert forgot to add Shop. A feast of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology bullshit follows. It’s frustrating because it’s not as though most of us can’t relate to Liz’s search for inner balance, and it would be pointless to condemn her for having the means to solve her problems through extended peregrination.

Roberts embodies Liz’s yearning while never succumbing to morbid self-absorption—remember, Roberts was born perky. In fact, Roberts is capable of many things, including smartness, sexiness, even misdirection. As a star, the only thing missing is taste. Things might have worked better without Liz’s voice-over, which starts by telling us that survivors of genocide just want relationship advice and goes downhill from there. Liz becomes didactic by example, though I don’t buy any of her tidy revelations. She’s far more convincing when she’s just having a good time.

Richard Jenkins is nice as an abrasive Texan, until he’s prompted to suddenly spill his guts. Javier Bardem is strangely tough to accept as Brazilian, though I’m not sure if this tremendously gifted actor is actually trying. Is it just me, or is Bardem’s sloppily emotive performance commenting on the material? Is he perhaps wondering when exactly he was pegged as the new Antonio Banderas?

Roberts and her crazy brother Eric both have new movies out this weekend, one for women, the other, boys. Neither goes any distance toward renovating the careers of these talented siblings. Maybe they need to be in a movie together? My Best Friend's the Pope of Greenwich Village? Runaway Bride-Train? Help me out here.