Ten Years Ago: Killing Them Softly

Betsy Cass finds an odd amount of comfort in Andrew Dominik’s unrelentingly bleak 2012 crime drama Killing Them Softly.

It begins with trash. A silhouetted, industrial proscenium filled border to border with detritus wafting in the wind. A character enters frame. He’s surrounded by trash. He is trash. And so are we. Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly is not a subtle film. For a decade, that fact has been levied against it as a failure of artistic vision. But was Eisenstein subtle? Fassbender? Fosse? Sometimes the truth is so brutal that being bludgeoned with it is the only way to absorb it. Otherwise, we can write it off as a fable, a metaphor. Dominik wants to leave no room here for denial.  

Normally being the best film to earn an “F” from Cinemascore would seem an ignoble distinction, but it actually could be one of the most serendipitous things to happen to Killing Them Softly. Aside from granting it some notoriety, it also prepared certain audiences for the film in a very specific way. Most of the 21 other movies to earn an “F” score were just bad. A few others were narratively confusing or structurally unsatisfying. This film, only the second screen adaptation of a George V. Higgins novel (the first being the Robert Mitchum-starring The Friends of Eddie Coyle way back in 1973), is as straightforward as they come. But it is deeply, unrelentingly bleak. Middle America saw it, understood it, and hated it. The film is accusatory and implicating, with not one redeemable character or sympathetic sentiment. Walking into something you already know that people hated allows you to gird yourself for the experience. You chose to see it because you’re one of the people that will “get it.” But even with that foreknowledge, it’s a tough watch. One that I wanted to like more than I did ten years ago, because I, too, felt implicated.

Ostensibly, the movie follows the fallout after the robbery of a mob-protected card game. In reality, the film loudly announces, it is about America. And in America, it says, you are on your own. Set during the economic crisis of 2008 and the transition from the Bush to Obama administration, it uses newsradio and CSPAN like a score. Snippets of real speeches soundtracking car rides and whiskies and bureaucratic inner workings of the mob. During the aforementioned robbery, we hear Bush addressing the nation, questioning, “How did we get to this point in our economy?” A short while later he declares, “America has the most dedicated, talented and entrepreneurial workers in the world.” Like I said, not subtle. Despite that, at the time many read the film backwards, claiming it was an attempt to demonstrate that organized crime is a microcosm of the economy and that it too suffered in recession. All text and no subtext, the true meaning is blindingly obvious but maybe, at that moment in time, too painful to admit.

In America, we are used to rooting for the little guy, the misfit, the bandit. We assign glamor to mafiosos and Robin Hoods alike. We admire the independent spirit of hopelessly tilting against windmills. Our assholes are still aspirational. But Dominik, who has always been interested in interrogating the myth of America, is having none of that. He leaves the viewers with nothing to grasp on to. No one to root for and no prize at the end. The players are all despicable in their own way. The two men who knock over the card game, played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, are desperate in the embarrassing way, crass heroin addicts who are frequently referred to as smelling like animals in a bid to make them sub-human. Richard Jenkins embodies the dispassionate company man as mob middle management, incapable of seeing the human toll of his business. “Total corporate mentality,” he complains, and insists on getting an extra $1,000 approved before giving the go ahead for a job. James Gandolfini plays a greedy, misogynistic hitman unraveling at the prospect of going back to prison. Ray Liotta is a mobster who made his bed years ago, with the true consequences not materializing until his card game gets hit.

Only Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan, a hitman and enforcer, appears to have any redeeming characteristics. He sees the whole picture, which includes the human element; he asks people if they’re okay; he seems to live by a code. Something about him doesn’t fit in this world. He’s too refined, professional, existing without a hint of desperation. Pitt plays him as calm, keen, and present, never distracted or spiraling like all the others. He floats. Maybe he could be our anti-hero. It’s Brad Pitt after all. In reality, that just makes it all the more brutal when Dominik pulls the rug out from under the viewer in the final moments of the film. Actually, it’s more like reminding them they were always standing on bare ground.

Action frequently takes place in driving rain. The cinematography is sickly, dark, and tinged with fluorescent green. Blood is the only color to appear in the film. The bursts of violence are visceral and pitiful, replete with crying and vomit. And the consequences of that violence, lifeless and toe-tagged, are shown with somber remove. Everything is oppressive, inescapable. Everything is inevitable. Men pay not just for what they have done, but for what they are perceived to have done. In a way, this grants a manner of grace to its characters. They are animals, but they were made animals. When Pitt’s character confronts McNairy’s in the aftermath of the robbery, he gives him a choice: help with a hit or be killed. McNairy cries that he can’t choose. He doesn’t know if he can do the hit. “Can you do the other thing?” Pitt asks. There was never a choice. None of us ever had a choice.

But Dominik also doesn’t let us get away with using desperation as an excuse. We see our worst impulses up on the screen, acts that we justify to ourselves, unjustified. Even with merely the specious appearance of choice, we must still pay the price for our actions. It’s a trap, but so is the hope of transcending the trap. When Pitt at one point comforts Gandolfini’s character, saying, “Terrible lot of shit you go through,” his response is equal parts admirable and defeatist. “Whatta ya gonna do? Do the best you can.” It’s an ouroboros of helplessness. Nothing can be done. But you gotta do something. But there’s nothing to be done. And the consequences for doing and not doing both fall squarely back onto us.     

It’s with this thesis that the film fully discomfits the viewer. We spend the whole movie waiting for redemption or honor or hope. And for this, the film laughs at us. In the final scene, newly minted President Obama is heard on the television of a bar praising the American virtues of “democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.” I don’t want to say I believe all that, but even as someone for whom cynicism is deeply rooted, I wasn’t necessarily ready to hear the movie scoffing at the little hope many had allowed themselves to have. In retrospect, I’m not sure what we were feeling was actually hope but rather a respite, like we were just able to get our mouths above the surface. Dominik refuses to let us forget we’re drowning. So when Pitt’s character delivered a resolute, terminal rebuke of America’s past and present idealism, shoving our naïve hypocrisy in our faces, it didn’t feel good. The country was supposed to be on an upward trajectory, but we were being reminded we’ll always be disposable. Our protagonist is supposed to show us empathy, but instead showed us ruthlessness. In this moment, Jenkins labels him a “cynical bastard,” a fact we should have known the whole film but was expertly made a Trojan horse by his clear-eyed acceptance of a rigged system. We thought he understood the grim efficiency of America, but in fact he embodies it. It was a fatalism that originally seemed misplaced, but now feels embarrassingly prescient. The film has somehow transformed from confrontational to comforting, like a friend who buttresses your vision of the corrosive truth. ​​Ten years ago, I was expecting a reprieve. This time I was waiting for amnesty of a different kind, a barked mantra that has mutated from an attack to an affirmation: “I’m living in America. In America, you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”

Stray Notes:

– I guess I should address the elephant in the room, which is that the original cut of the film was almost twice as long as what was released….and you can tell. While I can understand why a studio would want to stay economical with something so dour, it led to some very lopsided pacing and jarring non sequiturs (like Mendelsohn’s oddly comedic escapades in Florida). Every scene is either two dudes talking or a precisely articulated set piece. In some ways, the unsettling feeling this creates is a boon for the film, but it’s obvious whole limbs of the plot have been excised. How else do you explain Sam Shepard being in it for all of 20 seconds?! Give me the “Margaret cut” of this thing! I want to wallow in it for three-and-a-half hours.

– Speaking of set pieces, even though the scene is short, I will always love the tracking shot across the outside of the trailer when Ray Liotta is getting beat up inside. The camera landing on the back door in anticipation of Liotta being tossed out of it is *chef’s kiss*. Truly Chekhov’s back door.

– Were there reshoots? I feel like Scoot McNairy has three different haircuts throughout the course of the film.

– After Killing Them Softly, Dominik had considered more forays into the dark side of America, including a Cormac McCarthy adaption and a couple stabs at works by Jim Thompson (one of which went forward with Michael Winterbottom directing and former Dominik collaborator Casey Affleck as the star). A full decade later, he finally landed on Blonde, which….oof.

– The misogyny of the characters in the film definitely merits discussion. Several casually fantasize about raping women, with the other characters pausing, grimacing slightly, and ultimately electing not to say anything. Although only one woman, a sex worker, appears in the entire thing, I don’t think the film itself is misogynistic. Rather it’s doing an effectively uncomfortable job of reflecting the way marginalized, desperate men punish women for their impotence and rage.

– This movie began with the title Cogan’s Trade, which is the title of the Higgins novel on which it is based. Maybe that’s a bit “bland” but never has a title done such a disservice to a film as Killing Them Softly. Why? WHY?!

– Back when the movie was still called Cogan’s Trade, Sam Rockwell was attached to star (I assume in the McNairy role). Variety described the film as “a heist comedy.” Hoo-boy….

– More in the “this movie is not subtle” argument, it features several of the most literal needle drops in film history, including “When the Man Comes Around” for Pitt’s introduction and “Money, That’s What I Want.” For some reason the only one that really bugs me is the subtlest, the use of the instrumental opening of “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground while the characters are shooting up. Probably because this had already been relentlessly mocked by Trainspotting a decade earlier. I feel like they did miss a real opportunity to play “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen at some point.

— Betsy Cass