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!”

    

The protracted, self-conscious assimilation of an established aesthetic in the realization of an extremely interesting merging of history and myth

To draw back the curtain of myth while simultaneously exploiting its allure, mining it for its commentary on what it says about our participation in myth-building: this is something a great western can do beautifully. Westerns have a special ability to be romantic and iconoclastic at once. Sam Peckinpah pulled off this particular feat at least three times, though in doing so, he seems to have helped kill off the genre for nearly everyone trying to follow his example.

Even ardent fans can probably count on their digits the number of great westerns to have appeared on the frontier since those heady 1970s. Maybe that’s why Andrew Dominik’s sophomore feature seems so intent on invoking that period in his grandiose adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford –though it would surely have benefited from a more modest approach. Dominik’s rustling prairies and half-mumbled reveries owe a debt to Terrence Malick that simply can’t be paid through these protracted misadventures into formal fidgeting and half-digested philosophy.

I figure I’m actually the target audience for The Assassination. A story about a strange kid strangely obsessed with his hero, gradually coming to a place where he eclipses him by consuming him, a story loosely told in painterly Albertan landscapes and enigmatically detailed scenes of stark, awkward violence –I generally gobble this stuff up. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s shot by Roger Deakins and scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Cave even appears in the film, singing the same tune as that hapless minstrel in Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James, a movie that's pretty much the exact opposite of The Assassination in every way imaginable.) Yet maybe its because the film has so much going for it that it continually annoyed me so. There’s such poetry inherent in the material, such talent involved, that it should have been much better.

The film’s voice-over is risibly redundant, frequently telling us precisely what the actors are doing on screen, albeit in the purple prose of antiquated literature. Every time Dominik ended another self-consciously pretty scene with another fade to black, only to open on another very pretty scene with Vaseline around the edge of the lens and yet more voice-over, I think I actually slapped my head in wonder that someone could work so hard to kill the momentum of a picture.

Pretty too is Brad Pitt as James, a not-too present presence who sort of pops up now and then to look groomed and tormented or bully somebody around. At one point he sadistically beats a little boy and then cries afterwards. More interesting is Casey Affleck’s Ford, who at least is effortlessly convincing as a twerp. There’s a memorable, tremendously creepy moment where Ford lists all of the things he believes he has in common with James. But the film’s most appealing performance is arguably that of Paul Schneider, whose tenure with David Gordon Green has given him the chops to give a genuinely rascally reading of a line like “They say when a woman’s on fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her up with your body!”

There are, to be sure, certain moments and ideas in The Assassination I won’t forget for some time. The thing is, rather than making me want to go back and see the movie again, almost every one of them make me want to just read Hansen’s book.