Two low level crooks recently released from prison are hired to rob a mob-run high stakes poker game. The robbery goes off without a hitch but mob enforcer Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is brought in to find out who was responsible and make sure they are eliminated. The rest of the movie is a messy, violent resolution of that question, with few twists or revelations.
What makes the film different from a straightforward mob vengeance movie is the amount of time it spends with the characters just talking to one another. Dialog makes up the majority of the running time, with the low life robbers and their sponsor squabbling with one another, or with Pitt either arguing with his handler or trying to manage the distracted out of town hit man (James Gandolfini) he hires to kill the robbers. As a result of all this talking, you get a deep dive into the lives of petty criminals. And with a great cast that includes Pitt, Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn, and Richard Jenkins, this approach works well. Mendelsohn is especially memorable as the greasy junkie hood who makes a living stealing dogs before agreeing to participate in the robbery.
Killing Them Softly is based on the 1974 novel Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins. Higgins is best known for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, another gangster story set in Boston, which was also adapted into film in 1973 starring Robert Mitchum.
Higgins was known for his reliance on long and dense passages of dialog to tell his stories, most of which focused on the criminals rather than law enforcement. Before turning to writing, he worked as a journalist and as a prosecuting attorney focused on organized crime. He was proud of the authenticity of the jargon he employed and the insights he provided into the everyday life of criminals. The movie is remarkably true to the book, lifting complete passages of dialog nearly intact.
His characters lace their conversations with obscenities and often focus on sex, graphically. A typical passage:
"Dillon don't look good," Amato said."He don't look good at all. I was in town the other day and I saw him. He looks white, white all around the gills. I didn't say anything to him, but he don't look good at all."
"Dillon's getting old," Frankie said.
"We all are," Amato said. "Look at me, the way I let that little shitbird of yours get to me the other day? I never would've done that before. I'm yapping at the kids all the time for Christ's sake. For seven years the only time I see the little bastard's once a month or so, and now I'm finally home and I'm giving them hell all the time. I'm always fighting with my wife. I never used to fight with my wife. I used to, she was being a big pain in the ass, I used to kind of roll with the punches, you know? Now I don't. I'm getting old. And I swore, boy, I was in? I swore when I got out I was gonna make every minute count, the rest of my life. You ever get me some place again, I can go to sleep without some asshole shoving his dick through the bars, all right, that's all I ask. And am I doing it? No. Of course not. I'm just as big an asshole now as I was before."
In both the book and movie, the police are mostly absent. There's no dogged detective following the trail of bodies, no uniformed officers waiting to grab characters the moment they make a mistake. Justice is served (or miscarriages of justice) in a hermetically sealed world of criminals. The only exception is when the junkie robber screws up and is captured with an ounce of heroin. He's whisked away, never to be seen again, and the scene is fairly brief.
Director Andrew Dominik keeps the televisions or radios in the background running constant news clips of the 2008 financial collapse, acting as a not very subtle commentary on exploitative capitalism. Dominik eventually overdoes it, clobbering viewers over the head with the point. If he had dialed it back by a third, it would have served its purpose. He's not wrong, though; a good hard-boiled story should be told from the perspective of the underclass, the losers or the petty criminals that exist on the fringes of the economy. This is a theme I will revisit regularly going forward.
The film was modestly successful at the box office but received a rare "F" score from audiences on CinemaScore. I imagine a number of viewers, lured in by the presence of Brad Pitt, were not amused by the lengthy stretches of dialog. I acknowledge that, for this reason, this movie may not be for everyone. But I would think at least some fans of Quentin Tarantino might find it more palatable, even though most of the dialog doesn't quite rise to Tarantino's level.
As far as Higgin's book goes, the heavy reliance on dialog wears on the reader after a while. Also, the further into the mind of a petty criminal you go, the less you may want to be there. There are no surprises to spike your interest and there is no character arc to speak of for anyone. But the story does have a certain propulsive weight that carries across the finish line.