killing them softly: i still can’t shut up about this movie

I've already made what I thought was a pretty good case that Killing Them Softly 'earns' its violence, but that didn't really get into why we should care about the movie overall, which is a tougher question to answer. I wasn't sure that I did while I was watching it and only came to the conclusion later that yes, I did care, and a lot.

I didn't know this right away because the film is not 'accessible,' for one of the most straightforward reasons: It's a hard to even know who we (the audience) are supposed to care about. Director Andrew Dominik doesn't really establish a protagonist, and you could spend a large part of the movie wondering who you should be rooting for.

We start off following Frankie, a frazzled ex-con, and his partner Russell, who is naturally charismatic if really greasy and personally despicable. (The actor playing him, Ben Mendelsohn, looks uncannily like an aged Michael Angarano, which probably doesn't mean much to you but whatever.)

Then, after enough time has passed that you'd assume no new major characters are going to show up, Brad Pitt finally arrives accompanied by a thumping Johnny Cash song. Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, the kind of crook whose job it is to keep other crooks in line, apparently. His meeting with a corporate type played by Richard Jenkins is the first big scene for both of them. The meeting isn't explained beforehand at all really, and the sudden, close view we have on their conversation feels out of place, like somehow we're cheating on the guys we met before. Soon enough, however, we're back with Frankie and Russell in a scene where Russell is nodding out because he's high on heroin. The camera nods out right with him, flickering, blacking out, and jerking back awake. So maybe he's the one we're following and seeing the story through. But nope. Russell disappears somewhere in the second half of the movie. Meanwhile, James Gandolfini has shown up as another hit man, Mickey, and given us the impression that the rest of the film might be him and Brad Pitt having tense conversations laden with subtext.

And yet we're denied again; Mickey disappears in the second half of the movie, too. I'm trying to get across here the degree to which this movie doesn't point out a protagonist and barely keeps its characters around long enough for you to know what they're about. Dominik, the director, partly seems to be playing with our assumptions about how characters are established then maneuvered by the plot of a movie. In this movie, there won't be any of that, as his characters seemingly move out of the story without much to-do.

If there's a protagonist, it's Pitt as Jackie, but his late arrival makes it feel like he's not supposed to be the guy whose story this is. And, anyway, he's an emotionally static figure and doesn't change over the course of the movie — he never gets open with us about how he's feeling, much, and we never get a moment where we get to feel close to him. Jackie is like a force of nature. To get a good sense of his seeming unflappability, check out the trailer's brief scene between him and Frankie (Scoot McNairy): Pitt's Jackie is completely in control of the situation. Frankie is a variable here, while Jackie feels like some kind of cosmological constant.

This whole refusal on the movie's part to finger a good protagonist for us leaves us with a dilemma. The null hypothesis would be that the lack of real protagonist or character development means the movie just didn't know what it was doing. But I hope you believe that this is not so, given the precision and thoughtfulness with which the film has been made, the main point I elaborated on in that last post.

Instead of a character to root for or care about, the whole range of characters, taken together, could be what we ought to focus on. Specifically, a recent article in Jump Cut about public vs. private interests in Syriana got me thinking about how people do their jobs and the range of ways we see people doing them in this movie.

Before I can explain why this is important, I should mention one important theme I haven't gotten to yet: Killing Them Softly is set in 2008 during the financial crisis that began our current economic "malaise" (read: terrible situation that has cost us jobs and heartache), and several scenes have the drone of talking heads or public figures in the background on TV or the radio.

Critics seem to have taken this awkward thematic injection badly, which is fair enough, since the monologue that Jackie/Pitt ends up making on the sociological significance of money in America makes the link between organized crime and capitalism a little too obvious. But those parallels are worth thinking about anyway, even if the movie doesn't pull them off flawlessly. As others have already hit on, part of the obviousness of this thematic association is that it makes presidents and their ministers look like double-talking scoundrels next to the ordinary bad guys of our plot, who are now even a bit admirable for stabbing you from the front and not through the wallet. (Whoopee with the metaphors!)

But there's another topic I want to broach here that I haven't seen anything about: Jackie's professionalism in light of this quasi-explicit theme on the woes of capitalism. Jackie is, more than anybody, a man defined by his job and his intent on getting the thing done. This is even clearer with Mickey as his foil; drowning himself in alcohol and unable to rouse his morale to get the dirty work done, Mickey seems to offend Jackie's sensibilities. You can see the reserve on Jackie/Pitt's face as he gently cajoles Mickey. Jackie doesn't want to anger the fatso because he still wants Mickey to do the job, and Jackie has to walk a narrow line. He can't be honest with Mickey — in truth he's disgusted with him — but he needs Mickey to finish the job, alreadyferchrissakes.

And why? Because, as Jackie explains earlier in the movie, he can't whack one of the targets he's been hired to kill because he's met the guy before. It's a spiritual thing of some sort for him, and this revelation becomes one of Jackie's only personal moments, in a movie where he is consumed by his role as hit man, jettisoning all personal attachments and preferences as soon as they get in the way of the fulfillment of that duty. You've got to hand it to Pitt for playing a guy who is playing a role and making it all seem believable insofar as you never see Pitt playing a role. Instead, you just see Jackie the character playing a role, the role of passionless criminal enforcer. But Jackie, unlike Pitt, shows more of his seams and his real feelings. His doesn't let his inner conflict spill over into the rest of the world, but you can still read it on his face.

photo by toddross

In light of all this, director Dominik's way of getting us to think about capitalist rhetoric along with the criminal underworld begins to seem less ham-handed. Maybe what he's doing isn't so direct and obvious as just comparing the two domains and telling us that they're both morally corrupt. Maybe Dominik isn't even talking about Wall Street, K Street, or crooks. Maybe Dominik is trying to talk about us, the public, the people, the working women and men. Maybe he wants to talk about how we become our jobs, and how failing at that means we are elbowed aside by those who are more suited to the business of conforming the self to the task.

And if that's the case, honey, pity the hit man who can't hit.