Killing Them Softly (MA). Director: Andrew Dominik. Starring: Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini. 97 minutes
On a television in a grimy bar, freshly minted US president Barack Obama waxes lyrical about the unity of the people. In the foreground, Jackie Cogan (Pitt), a brutal and enigmatic enforcer of the criminal underworld, scoffs at Obama's nice words. America is not a community, he counters — it's a business. And Cogan just wants to get paid. 'I'm living in America,' he has grumbled previously, 'and in America, you're on your own.'
Such is the vision of the decrepit American Dream proffered by Australian filmmaker Dominik (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) in Killing Them Softly; a violent parable about American capitalism and the ignorance and incompetence born in bureaucracy.
It takes place in a New Orleans underworld run by a loose committee of mafia 'middle managers'. There's a high-stakes card game in this town run by local mid-wig Markie Trattman (Liotta), where the wiseguys go to throw their cash around. One local gangster comes up with a scheme to rob the game, employing two small-time crooks (McNairy and Mendelsohn) to do the deed. The fallout from their 'perfect plan' is both costly and brutal.
There was a lot of money to be made on the card game, so the main objective is to ensure that the game keeps going. The only way to do that, Cogan explains to the mob lawyer (Jenkins) who enlists his services to help set things to rights, is to restore confidence. Confidence, after all, is key to economic order, as we are reminded by one of the political speeches that are woven, via radio news broadcasts, throughout the film's soundtrack.
These broadcasts underline repeatedly the fact that Dominik's fictional scenario is not just an economic crisis in miniature — it is the Global Financial Crisis rendered as bloodsoaked morality tale. Its characters operate in a moral vacuum according to the dictums of the free market. It is survival not just of the fittest but of the one who best understands and adheres most slavishly to the principles of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
Restoring confidence entails making an example of Trattman. Cogan knows Trattman isn't responsible, but the gangster's peers have placed the blame squarely in his corner. He must be seen to pay. On the question of whether