8/12/15: Killing is His Business

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2008 Presidential election, Andrew Dominik, based on a book, Ben Mendelsohn, best friends, Brad Pitt, Chopper, cinema, Cogan's Trade, crime as business, crime film, crime thriller, dramas, economic crisis, film reviews, films, financial collapse, George V. Higgens, Greig Fraser, heist films, heroin trafficking, heroin users, hired killers, hitman, illegal gambling, James Gandolfini, Killing Them Softly, literary adaptation, Max Casella, mobsters, Movies, Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepard, Scoot McNairy, set in 2008, Slaine, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, Trevor Long, Vincent Curatola, writer-director

Like most established film genres, mob movies come in a rainbow assortment of various flavors: they can be pedal-to-the-metal thrillers, pensive character studies, dramas, comedies or any combination of the above. They can focus on the acts being committed, the people committing said acts or the authority figures trying to put said people behind bars. Mob movies might turn the gangsters into virtually mythical heroes or they might portray them as violent, bottom-feeding scum. They might be packed to the rafters with clever dialogue and insight or as reserved and serene as an undisturbed lake.

For the follow-up to his under-appreciated Western The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007), New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik takes aim at another literary adaptation: this time around, he puts his particular spin on George V. Higgens’ 1974 crime novel, Cogan’s Trade. By updating the action from the mid-’70s to the 2008 economic crisis/Presidential election, Dominik gives us yet another view of organized crime: the mob as a business entity. Like the white-collar figure-heads who pull the strings, Dominik gives us a view of organized crime that’s all about the bottom-line, cost-effectiveness, streamlining the organization and keeping the stockholders happy. You know…just like “Big Business” but with a lot more bullets and bloodshed.

The central plot to Killing Them Softly echoes Higgins’ novel fairly closely, albeit with that massive timeline shift from the ’70s to the ’00s. As in the novel, the main action involves ripping off a mob card game and pinning the blame on the schmuck who runs it. Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola aka The Sopranos’ Johnny Sacks) hires fresh-from-the-pen Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and his incredibly unreliable former bunk mate/heroin addict, Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), to rip off the aforementioned card game. The plan is actually pretty solid, since they have the perfect patsy: Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), the guy who runs the card game, actually orchestrated his own robbery of said game many years back and was never punished for his “crime.” If the game gets ripped off again, all eyes will be on Markie and, to quote the parlance, he’ll be “fish food.”

Enter Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), the soft-spoken, philosophical hitman who’s been sent by mob enforcer Dillon (Sam Shepard) and his underworld employers to get everything back on track. You see, when Trattman ripped off his game years ago, it put a temporary halt to the illegal card games, which ended up affecting the mob’s bottom line in a pretty major way. Jackie needs to restore order and reassure the “stockholders” that the games will be able to continue unimpeded.

As Jackie continues to meet with Driver (Richard Jenkins), the mob’s consigliori and his go-to man on this particular venture, Frankie, Russell and Johnny Amato try to keep their own heads above water, no easy feat given that Russell’s eagerly returned to the smack addiction that initially landed him in prison. For his part, though, Jackie is only concerned with one thing: getting rid of every person involved with the heist, including poor Markie. It’s nothing personal, though…this is nothing but business.

Reuniting with his Assassination of… star Brad Pitt, Dominik turns in a decent adaptation of Higgins’ novel (which was, itself, sort of a companion piece to his better known debut, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), albeit one which still manages to fall short of the source material. In many ways, Killing Them Softly reminded me of another recent film that managed to disappoint despite its high-octane cast: American Hustle (2013). As with that film, a handful of truly great performances and a generally intelligent script still add up to a slightly underwhelming whole. It’s not that Killing Them Softly is a bad film, mind you: it’s just one that never fully gets to live up to its potential.

Chalk this up to a few different factors. For one, Dominik’s decision to move the action from the ’70s to the ’00s makes perfect sense, on paper, yet is executed in a less than perfect manner. The intention behind this seems to be a parallel between the United States’ economic meltdown in 2008 and the similar economic meltdown experienced by the mob due to the recent heist. In reality, however, none of this pays off until the film’s very final scene: for the most part, this is just an excuse to endlessly reference said economic meltdown, as well as that year’s Presidential campaign. To that end, we get countless George W. Bush soundbites, as well as countless Barack Obama soundbites: it’s hard to recall a scene in the film that doesn’t feature a TV, radio or newspaper constantly talking about the financial crisis. It’s complete overkill and quite equitable to the equally odious tendency of some period pieces to over-rely on the slang and vernacular of whatever era they’re depicting. It becomes so much background noise and, to be frank, adds little to the overall narrative.

Killing Them Softly also has a tendency to relegate its strongest aspect, Brad Pitt’s excellent performance as Cogan, to the back burner in favor of an increased emphasis on the travails of Frankie and Russell. As should be fairly obvious, that’s not exactly the best move: Pitt is a constantly magnetic presence whenever he’s onscreen, whereas the normally reliable McNairy and Mendelsohn turn in performances that tend to grate on the nerves. With McNairy’s “Bahston” accent and Mendelsohn’s Aussie inflection fighting each other for dominance, too much of Killing Them Softly comes across like an acting workshop where the performers have been given scenarios to explore: “You guys are low-level crooks…go!” Add to this McNairy’s wishy-washy characterization and the fact that Mendelsohn just turns in one of his patented “slovenly cretin” roles (the differences between his character here and the one he played in TV’s Bloodline, for example, are so minute as to be negligible) and we’re left with a couple of protagonists who just aren’t particularly interesting.

This reliance on past performances actually affects more of the film than just McNairy and Mendelsohn. In one of his last few roles, James Gandolfini’s take on hard-drinking hitman “New York” Mickey come across like a more exhausted Tony Soprano, while Sopranos co-star Curatola’s Johnny Amato is an almost exact replica of his Johnny Sacks character: the levels of meta are strong with this one. Throw in Liotta doing yet another sad-sack gangster and you have lots of characters who seem overly familiar, even though we’ve just met them.

In truth, all of the films best scenes belong to Pitt and Richard Jenkins: while the rest of the film flops between sober crime thriller and slightly sardonic black comedy, only the interplay between Jackie and Driver manages to find the perfect combination of both. At their best, these scenes remind of the Coen Brothers’ innate grasp on “extraordinary characters doing ordinary things” and the film could certainly have benefited from more of them. It’s little surprise, then, that the highly effective finale belongs solely to Pitt and Jenkins: the two are always the film’s high-water mark, so handing them the keys, at the end, only makes sense.

It’s easy to imagine a slightly different take on this material, one that keeps the updated time-frame but puts the emphasis back on Jackie (the original novel, after all, is called Cogan’s Trade for a reason). There’s plenty of rich material to be mined as far as the parallel between corporate business models and the Mafia goes but Dominik’s script never goes any deeper than the point made in Pitt’s closing speech: America isn’t a country, it’s a business. As a character, Jackie is a pretty great one: he’s charismatic, thoughtful, smart, eloquent, appropriately cold-blooded yet with a firmly established internal compass that always keeps him pointed towards true north.

When Frankie whines to Jackie that Johnny Amato isn’t a “bad guy” and doesn’t deserve what’s coming to him, Jackie’s response is honest, perfectly calibrated and delivered without a hint of sarcasm: “None of ’em are…they’re all nice guys, kid.” Nothing about killing people is personal to Jackie (the title comes from his preference to kill from a distance aka “killing them softly): it’s all just part of his job, no more, no less.

This, of course, is the ultimate message that Dominik is getting at: when you break everything down, it’s all just business. Lots of characters and moments reiterate this talking point, over the course of the film, but no one hammers it home quite as well as Jackie. Pity, then, that Dominik didn’t give him more of the reins: as a whole, the film could have used a lot more of his inherent ability to knock ’em dead, softly or otherwise.

7/5/15 (Part Two): A Jackrabbit in a Den of Wolves

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Andrew Robertt, Ben Mendelsohn, Best of 2015, betrayal, bounty hunters, Caren Pistorius, cinema, class systems, dark humor, directorial debut, father-daughter relationships, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, flashbacks, greenhorns, Jay Cavendish, Jed Kurzel, John Maclean, Kodi Smit-McPhee, love story, Michael Fassbender, Movies, optimism vs pessimism, outlaws, Robbie Ryan, Rory McCann, sardonic tone, set in 1860s, Silas Selleck, Slow West, the Beta Band, the myth of the Old West, the taming of the Wild West, the Wild West, UK-New Zealand films, upper vs lower class, voice-over narration, Westerns, writer-director

There’s a point in writer-director John Maclean’s instantly classic feature-debut, Slow West (2015), that just may be one of the subtlest, most cutting bits of insight into the human condition that I’ve seen in some time. As they recover from the aftermath of a particularly chaotic, violent robbery attempt at a general store, 16-year-old Scottish greenhorn Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) looks past the stack of still-smoking corpses and right into the eyes of the dead robbers’ now-orphaned children. The children are impossibly young and innocent, their wide eyes seemingly unable to process the complete upending of their world, as they stand silently, gripping each others’ hands tight.

Feeling the instant onus of responsibility, Jay tells his travelling companion, hardened, sardonic gunfighter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), that they’ll just need to take the kids with them. It’s the only thing that makes sense, after all: Jay and Silas weren’t responsible for the death of the urchins’ parents but they would be complete monsters if they just left them there, on their own, to die. The kids can just hitch a ride with them as they proceed on their mission across the frontier wasteland, in search of Jay’s beloved Rose (Caren Pistorius). Jay is eager to help, his eyes bright and determined, until Silas take all the wind out of his sails with one off-handed response: “And then what?” Silas, you see, is nothing if not a realist and knows one very important fact above all else: the desire to do good just isn’t enough…without the ability to follow through, it’s all just stuff and nonsense…smoke and bullshit. He accepts the fact that Jay won’t: taking the kids with them would be as sure a death-sentence as leaving them there to rot, good intentions be damned.

It’s precisely this level of insight and intelligence that makes Slow West not only the best Western to come down the pike in years but also one of the very best films of this still-in-progress year. A mature, darkly humorous and gorgeously shot character study that has little use for easy stereotypes or empty action, Maclean’s debut is the perfect antidote for overwrought, multiplex inanity, the very antithesis to the gazillion-dollar superhero films that currently clog cinematic arteries. Featuring a fantastic cast, a brilliant script and images lovely enough to frame, Slow West should be a poignant reminder of a time when cinema didn’t need to rely on shouting and CGI to slug audiences right in the solar plexus.

Plotwise, Slow West is the very definition of streamlined efficiency. The aforementioned Jay Cavendish, the son of a Scottish lord and lady, travels to the untamed chaos of 1860s frontier America in pursuit of his beloved Rose and her father, John (Rory McCann), after a terrible accident finds the father and daughter forced to leave their native land one step ahead of a lynch mob. With only the vaguest idea of where to look for his beloved, Jay sets off across the plains, so wet-behind-the-ears that he practically leaves a puddle wherever he goes.

In no time, Jay finds himself in the crosshairs of a group of miscreants hunting a fleeing Native American, one short step from getting his naive brains blown out all over his citified duds. At the last-minute, however, a mysterious gunman appears and blasts everyone but Jay straight to hell: this is the silent, contemplative Silas, a character who would’ve been played by none other than Clint Eastwood were this about four decades older. Silas knows that Jay is an accident waiting to happen, a plucky little chicken traipsing his way through an entire country full of hungry foxes, and he offers to be his bodyguard, in exchange for a little cold, hard cash. Jay heartily agrees, although he’s completely unaware of the other half of this particular coin: there’s a huge bounty out on Rose and her father (dead or alive) and Silas wants Jay to, unwittingly, lead him right to a much bigger payday.

As the two ride across the Old West, they encounter an almost endless variety of outlaws, wandering musicians, grizzled bounty hunters and foreign immigrants, each individual following their own particular path to salvation or destruction. Chief among these unique characters is Silas’ former gang leader, the extraordinarily lethal Payne (Ben Mendelsohn): Payne and his gang also have their sights set on Rose and her father and certainly won’t mind burying an old colleague, if they have to. As Jay and Silas continue to bond, they get ever closer to the beloved Rose, albeit with some suspiciously gunfighter-shaped shadows following behind. Will Silas be able to overcome his patently cynical nature in order to help his young charge? Will Jay ever reunite with Rose? Will true love really save the day or it just a myth as fanciful and false as Jay’s sunny view of this “brave new world”?

First off, let’s make one thing clear: Slow West is just about as perfect a film (certainly as perfect a full-length debut) as I can recall seeing, the kind of movie that hits you immediately and keeps you rapt right through the closing credits. From the genuinely stunning cinematography (if Robbie Ryan doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar, I’ll punch a hole in a wall) to the often whimsical score to the utterly thrilling action setpieces, Slow West is one exquisitely crafted piece of art. Add in a truly smart script, full of great dialogue and surprising doses of humor (the scene where Jay and Silas come upon the skeletal body of a logger crushed beneath a tree, ax still in hand, is one of the single greatest sight gags ever) and one of the best casts in some time and I’ll be honest: I can’t really find much fault here. At all.

Fassbender and Smit-McPhee are absolutely perfect as the unlikely partners, each playing off the other in ways both expected and truly surprising. The aforementioned Eastwood reference is not stated lightly: as someone who worships at the altar of everything Eastwood (at least through the ’90s), I found plenty of nice parallels between Fassbender’s performance, here, and my squint-eyed childhood hero. His is a low-key performance, as much about what’s not said as what is. While I’m usually not the biggest fan of cinematic voice-overs, Silas’ narration throughout is an integral part of the perfection, leading us to one of the most perfect endings I’ve seen in some time.

For his part, Smit-McPhee finds the perfect balance between Jay’s inherent helplessness and the steely determination that allowed him to make this dangerous trek in the first place. At any point, the character of Jay could have slipped into either obnoxious comic relief (look at the silly Scottish wimp!) or complete irrelevancy (why focus on this yahoo when you’ve got badass Silas over there?). It’s to both Smit-McPhee and Maclean’s tremendous credits, however, that Jay is always sympathetic: we want him to succeed because he seems like a genuinely good, hopeful and positive person. This pie-in-the-sky optimism is absolutely critical to the film’s underlying themes and Slow West wouldn’t be nearly the overwhelming success it is without his able participation. My advice? Get Fassbender and Smit-McPhee into another film, stat!

Like the best films of Jim Jarmusch, however, the supporting cast gives as good as the leads do. Pistorius is perfect in a relatively small role, imbuing her character with such a co-mingled sense of joy and unbearable sorrow that she makes every second of her screen time count. Mendelsohn, who might be the very definition of an actor who really needs no introduction, absolutely shines as the gang leader, turning in one of the coolest, most fun and vile villains to hit the big-screen since the glory days of Peckinpah films. In fact, much of Slow West recalls Peckinpah’s work in style and theme, if not necessarily unmitigated bloodshed. With his odd fur coat, droll manner and reptilian coldness, Payne is an instantly iconic creation: my only complaint, here, is that we don’t get nearly enough of him.

Production-wise, Slow West is at the absolute top of its game, no two ways about it. What really tips the film into classic territory, however, is how smart and insightful it is. This isn’t the stereotypical Western, full of flinty men blowing other flinty men to Kingdom Come. In many ways, Slow West is about the disparity between intent and action, between wanting a better world and actually doing something about it. Time and time again, Silas points out the difference between his and Jay’s personal philosophies: Jay sees the Wild West as a place of endless promise, full of hard-working people doing their best to overcome the elements (and themselves), carving out their own spot in an unforgiving landscape, while Silas sees the frontier as a no-man’s-land full of outlaws, dust, murder and drudgery. To accept Jay’s worldview is to invite absolute destruction, as far as Silas is concerned: let your guard down just once and you’re wormfood. To accept Silas’s worldview, however, is equally destructive: if no one is good, if no one can change and if the capacity for peaceful coexistence is a myth, what, exactly, do we have to live for?

As smart as it is beautiful, Slow West is an absolute treasure, the kind of film that the Coens thought they were making with their True Grit (2010) remake, only to fall short of the mark. As apt to make you chuckle as stare in awe, Maclean has established himself as one of the most exciting new filmmakers operating right now: the fact that the writer-director is only on his first film (after a pair of shorts) is even more extraordinary. The fact that Maclean comes to us not through the film world but the music world is that much more astounding: erstwhile music fans might recognize him as one of the driving forces behind Scottish indie heroes The Beta Band.

To restate the very obvious: I absolutely loved Slow West. From the craft to the message to the absolute perfect synthesis of form and meaning, Maclean’s debut is nothing short of a revelation. At 84 minutes, there isn’t one wasted scene, shot or motion, no sense of pandering, hand-holding or dumbing-down. This is cinema at its very best, the kind of movie that makes you feel glad to be alive. As a lifelong movie fan, I look for films like this all the time but it’s like finding a needle in a field of haystacks. Good thing, then, that Maclean is all needles and no hay: when I’m looking for a quality film in the future, I have a pretty good idea where to look.  If you enjoy quality movies, too, I suggest you do the same thing.