Features > Movie Reviews > Killing Them Softly…

The second collaboration between star Brad Pitt and director Andrew Dominik is very different in look and feel from their first, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, even if it shares some similarities: they’re both about the criminal underclass (albeit more than a century apart), and both adaptations of “wordy” novels.

But where the western was beautifully, achingly slow and lavished in great swathes of voice over narration, Killing Them Softly is all about the dialogue; the elaborately profane street philosophizing that was a trademark and structuring principle of the great crime novelist George V Higgins.

Higgins seems all but forgotten these days, and most of his novels are out of print. Film fans know him for his first book, which became the basis for a terrific Peter Yates, Robert Mitchum movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Surprisingly, Cogan’s Trade becomes only the second of his books to make it to the screen.

Why the reluctance? A lawyer and assistant attorney general for Massachusetts for many years, Higgins hid his plots behind the b.s. his characters spouted, the lies they told each other and the anecdotes they used to explain themselves. In other words, he puts the reader in the position of the jurist, trying to piece together events from numerous points of view and a gallery of unreliable witnesses. Attention must be paid.

First published in 1974, Cogan’s Trade has been updated to New Orleans in 2008, and the month leading up to the last US Presidential election – which was also, of course, the time of the financial meltdown.

From the very first radio and TV reports of the crisis and the campaign rhetoric from Obama and McCain as an ironic counterpoint to the nefarious wheeler-dealing we witness: capitalism as its practiced on the mean streets. Gangster movies have always been political – the first words in The Godfather are “I believe in America” – but rarely has the connection been so explicit as it is here.

Brad Pitt is Cogan, a fixer for mobsters – which is a polite way of saying a hitman, though he’ll also break arms if you prefer, or even just murmur a few choice words if he thinks they’ll have the desired effect.  

The story works backwards when Cogan is asked to repair the damage done by a couple of bottom-feeders who have ripped of a gambling den and framed the owner of the club (Ray Liotta), a scenario that won’t work out well for any of them.

Among the movie’s vivid low lifes, James Gandolfini is terrific as a once respected contract killer belly-flopping into a midlife crisis, while Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom) well nigh steals the show as a lippy Australian junkie. What unites them is what divides them – the fact that they’re all out for number one.

In Dominik’s searingly ascerbic and yes, sometimes very violent treatment this is a defining American characteristic. Gripping, serious and atmospheric, Killing Them Softly is a great contemporary New Orleans noir. Bottom line, it’s a crime movie that drug dealers, bankers and businessmen will understand equally well.