Wise guys, goodfellas, reservoir dogs. You dig the lingo, get the jargon, like the genre, you’ll dig, get and like KILLING THEM SOFTLY (MA) the latest film from CHOPPER writer/director, Andrew Dominik.
Returning to the milieu of contemporary crims and crooks after a visit to the Wild West with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik delivers a cross between talkative Tarantino and bloody balletic Peckinpah in this adaptation of a George V. Higgins novel.
Higgins novels are dialogue driven with flashy, fully fleshed characters, and it’s bizarre that not more of his work has been adapted. On the strength of this production, expect a slew of Higgins’ stories to be slated.
Originally titled Cogan’s Trade, after the enforcer played by Brad Pitt who, when it comes to these people who need to be murdered for some misdemeanour against the mob, likes to “kill them softly”, a quick kill, not a torturous drawn out torment.
His targets here are three guys who have robbed a card game causing the local criminal economy to collapse. One of them is an Australian, an aspiring drug dealer who is dealing dogs to make some cash before he embarks on the heist, is played with an unglamorous grunge by Ben Mendelsohn, a pleasure-seeking pig, a stinky filthy guy in body, mind and mouth.
It’s a tour de force in low life, drug addled dopey-ness, a stand-out in a remarkable ensemble of actors that includes Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini. Gandolfini’s character, a hit man on hard times, spits verbal venom like a vitriolic viper; vituperative, vexatious, venal.
KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an allegory of the current global financial crisis with all the characters motivated only by the desire for money, their moral compasses completely out of whack, and their dreams our nightmare. The time span of the film follows the 2008 presidential elections with Obama and Bush platitudes playing on televisions in the background.
As Brad Pitt’s character, Jackie, says, “America is not a country, it’s a business’.
The Great Depression is evoked in this current currency catastrophe through clever motif of Depression era songs as harbingers of annihilation, a device the great Denis Potter, creator of Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, would approve.
Patricia Norris, as production and costume designer, has created an awesomely real universe of a hellish underworld of collapsed economy, and Greig Fraser’s camera work has brilliantly captured the environment.
Ugly, brutal, bloody, incisive and bloody funny, KILLING THEM SOFTLY is a must see.
(c) Richard Cotter
11th October, 2012
Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- KILLING THEM SOFTLY, Richard Cotter, Sydney Arts Guide