Killing Them Softly

A lawyer, professor and assistant U.S. Attorney who long investigated organized crime in addition to writing 27 novels, Higgins knew well of what he wrote. His first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was made into a fine film and his third, Cogan’s Trade, the basis of this one, consists of torrents of exceptionally vivid Beantown wiseguy dialogue with bits of plot tucked almost incidentally into the chatter. Moving the action to decimated post-Katrina New Orleans without a tourist in sight, Dominik has done a keen, disciplined job of coaxing the plot out of the shadows while retaining the flavor of underclass lingo and attitude. With the background dominated by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s optimistic speeches stressing the availability of “the American promise” to all, some bottom-feeding crims plot what looks like a no-risk scheme: Old-timer Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola, the great Johnny Sak of The Sopranos) hires unwashed kids Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to raid the regular card night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who once robbed his own game and got away with itWriter-director Andrew Dominik, whose extraordinary Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford proved too long and arty for the masses, repositions George V. Higgins’ 1974 Boston mob-world novel as a metaphor for the ills of American capitalism circa 2008, a neatly provocative tact. But he also shamelessly shows off his directorial acumen; unlike the leading character, who’s all business, Dominik makes sure you notice all his moves. Tight, absorbing and entertainingly performed by a virtually all-male cast topped by Brad Pitt, this Weinstein Co. release should generate solid mid-level business this fall

What matter more are style and attitude, which Dominik ladles on like sauce on ribs. Russell’s drug-addled disorientation is represented by multiple distortions of time, visual perception and sound; the pursuit of one victim is imaginatively covered entirely from the outside of the building in which the chase is consummated; Cogan arrives on the scene to the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around”; the just-scraping-by 21st century hoods drive late-‘60s/early-‘70s cars like a Riviera and Toronado; and one man’s execution is rendered from many angles in a slow-motion explosion of breaking glass and penetrating bullets so elaborate and prolonged that it resembles a self-standing art installation.

In a related way, some of the dialogue scenes, especially a couple of near-monologues superbly delivered by Gandolfini as a booze-guzzling, sex-obsessed, past-his-prime hit man, almost have the feel of brilliant, free-standing acting class scenes; they serve the film’s purposes, to be sure, but there’s a self-consciously showy aspect to them that makes you easily imagine students using them as audition pieces.

The film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne’er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom, but it never lets you forget it, from Pitt’s pithy excoriation of Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy right down to his “Crime is the business of America” final line that is bound to be widely quoted.