The Most Overrated Value in Moviemaking

“Killing Them Softly,” which opens today, is, following “Argo” and “Skyfall,” the latest of the year’s ballyhooed releases to serve up praise of old-school ways via old-school cinematic means. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia when it’s held up to the light; the past-as-snowglobe is a classically ripe theme for art. Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of a 1974 novel by George V. Higgins is updated, set not in the present but in 2008, in the tumultuous days of the financial meltdown, and it makes overt and emphatic use of those events (largely as a sonic backdrop, via audio clips from TV and radio commentators) to suggest, superficially and cynically, the failings of modern times without adding anything interesting about bygone halcyon days. It’s filled with the signifiers of classic gangster films without being one. It neither makes use of those signifiers nor plays with them; it takes no position on them whatsoever, because—true to its nostalgia—it’s constructed to do nothing but tell a story. And storytelling is the most overrated value and misattributed term in the world of moviemaking and, for that matter, criticism.

The classic dichotomy of plot and character is beside the point; while following a character in action, the inner life can be reflected in a moment—or, catching a character in repose, stories can be spun out on the wing. The dichotomy reflects the work of bad directors who don’t or can’t work in both realms at the same time, who see their movies as products or assemblages rather than conceiving and realizing them as worlds. The goal (stated or apparent) of storytelling is a red herring behind which filmmakers hide their lack of imagination, their lack of perspective. So it is with Dominik, who—taking from the novel a fine framework of crime and the underworld subsets from which it arises—makes a film that’s stylish but lacks style, conveys a message yet stays impersonal, pivots on changes in a milieu and a world that it fails to contemplate, and rests on a deep sediment of populist experience that it never samples or considers.

That world (grungy suburbs of Boston) features two young crooks (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) who—acting on bad advice from an older one (Vincent Curatola), a man who owns a failing dry-cleaning shop—hold up a Mob-run poker game that was formerly robbed by its very impresario (Ray Liotta) and whom, they’re advised, will get blamed in their stead. To clean up the mess, gangland higher-ups (in the person of a comically bland attorney, played by Richard Jenkins) call in a hit man (Brad Pitt) who calls in another (James Gandolfini) and finds himself with yet another mess on his hands. Just summarizing the story and considering its twists is sheer delight—which makes it all the stranger that the movie that would bring it to life, doesn’t.

Porosity: the context that Dominik filters into the film is tightly limited to news about the financial crisis. You can see what the movie’s bumper sticker says: some version of Woody Guthrie’s line from “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.” But there’s also music, television, religion, the day-to-day politics of ethnic identification, the web of family (working in the same milieu, David O. Russell did a splendid job with these wider connections in “The Fighter”). Neither Mob crime nor financial depredation occurs in a vacuum or, for that matter, in an exclusive cycle.

One ongoing theme of the movie is the lament for the days when crime bosses were independent agents rather than part of a quasi-corporate syndicate. Pitt waits impatiently for approval and negotiates terms with unseen Mob executives through Jenkins’s poker-faced middleman, who rues his bosses’ “total corporate mentality”—as if dreaming longingly, along with Dominik, of the classic trope of an underling being called onto the carpet by a bilious, pinky-ringed, wide-lapelled racketeer. The soundtrack features some old-fashioned, sentimental music, as if to contrast a defunct public image of a warm and decent world with the cold-stone reality of violent death—but never suggests that there’s anyone on hand in the movie who believes it. The trick is a straw person—one that doesn’t even stand up to reminiscence of the great gangster movies of the twenties and thirties.

The movie ends with some pointed political speechifying from Pitt, which, agree or not with the substance of the rhetoric, is more or less the first interesting thing in the film—and the question it brings up is where in the world it comes from. His character—a deliberately enigmatic hit man who, preferring not to kill people he knows and preferring to kill at a discreet distance (that’s where the movie’s title comes from), keeps apart from others in the crime world (“Very few guys know me”). There’s no reason for a hit man not to have retained some lessons from school or not to do some reading in his spare time. But Dominik doesn’t suggest anything at all about him, reducing him to his criminal function and then, in effect, handing him a political cue card to read from at the end. The movie would have been better if the cue card had been visible onscreen; if Dominik had been holding it; if Pitt pulled it from his pocket; if—in lieu of giving the moment some congruity in terms of the character’s back story—the filmmaker had made more of its incongruity.

There’s no depth to the characters’ inner world and no breadth to their outer one—there’s no contact with authority, no police interrogations, no probation officers, no journalists, no doctors, no social workers, no lawyers, no teachers, nothing to suggest fearful scrapes against an ostensibly more civil society or, for that matter, its tacit complicity in their travails. Dominik’s direction, with its simulacrum of style, is not oppressive or retentive but repressive: he never conveys the sense that he knows more than he’s saying, but, rather, that he’s content with what he knows and shows of their world and you ought to be, too. That’s why his overtly aestheticizing flourishes come off as blanks—most notably, a scene of bullets flying and wreaking mortal havoc in ultra-slow-motion, which is neither a fetishizing celebration of violence nor an attention-concentrating intensifier of its immoral effect.

I’ve written about the movie in terms of absence, not presence; of what it isn’t, rather than what it is. The actors are what it is; they’re left to do all the work, and the work is creditable. Pitt delivers forebodings with a calmly ingratiating tone, Jenkins wittily plays death’s bland suburban functionary, and Gandolfini huffs and chuffs with ominous overheat. They’re a pleasure to watch, but their scenes might as well be audition tapes. In any case, “Killing Them Softly” is not the only one of the year’s Oscarizables that lacks any flesh but what the actors bring. In fact, this mode of bare-bones storytelling—in which a pared-down framework of facts is presented, tightly and narrowly, as if foregrounding the plot and locating all traces of character in the actors’ performance—is one of the dominant trends of contemporary filmmaking. It doesn’t just serve the goal of brisk entertainment: it reflects the desire to pass the fiction off as objective truth—in order to convey as all the more self-evident the filmmaker’s political point.

Photograph: The Weinstein Company.
