A Look Back: “Killing Them Softly”.

I blame the advertising. Why anyone thought it would be a good idea to market Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly” as some sort of boneheaded, post-Tarantino revenge thriller is anyone’s guess. Surely Troy Duffy wasn’t busy. Perhaps The Weinstein Company and Annapurna Pictures couldn’t make apples nor oranges of the film’s twisted sense of humor. Or maybe it was the on-the-noggin political points that the film managed to squeeze in between beat-downs and profanity-laced soliloquies. It’s hard to say, we may never know.

It is also possible, however, that if “Killing Them Softly” were marketed in a way that was more reflective of the material in the film, that no one would see it. This is a hell of a film: dark, deeply unconventional and exciting at every turn. It’s best enjoyed not as a macho gangster saga (which, believe me, it isn’t) but rather as a pungent black comedy that’s seething with gnarled resentment and a litany of art-movie flourishes. It’s not subtle. Fact, it was never meant to be. Those of you looking for nuance, go read The New Yorker, this movie’s not for you. Do you really need someone holding your hand, telling you these are bad people and that the execution is… well, heavy-handed? No matter: “Killing Them Softly” was the best movie of 2012, and most certainly the most misunderstood.

In spite of being adapted from a book by crime fiction master George Higgins and being set in a nameless, poverty-stricken urban hellscape where tough guys drive beat-up old American cars, play cards and shoot heroin in between bouts of pool room poetry, the film isn’t your father’s crime movie. Sure, the cast is all male and the descriptions of women aren’t always flattering, but this is no glorification of macho bullshit a la Kurt Sutter or Terrence Winter’s “Boardwalk Empire”. Those who get the two modes of entertainment confused could stand to give Dominik’s scabrous, intelligent film another look. “KTS” does deal with the familiar parade of lowlives, druggies, hit men and middle managers that we’ve seen in a dozen sub-standard crime flicks, but there’s no sense of false glamorization in writer/director Andrew Dominik’s soul-sick evocation of the American apple gone rotten. Although this is certainly not the Australian filmmaker’s attempt at naturalism — the film flaunts its cinematic leanings at nearly every turn — there’s absolutely nothing fun about these sick fucks or the business they’re tied up in.

Business is the key word here. The lean, stripped-down narrative hums with authenticity and repeat viewings reveal a density and texture to the world being created that is simply staggering (check out that killer sound design!). At the outset, we have two bottom-feeders by the name of Frankie and Russell, played, respectively, by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, who are two of our sweatiest, wonderfully scummy character actors. Frankie and Russell — one an ex-con looking for a job, the other a garrulous junkie who fattens his pockets by selling stolen dogs — find themselves teaming up with a browbeaten ex-con who now owns a failing dry cleaning business (Vincent Curatola, Johnny Sack from “The Sopranos”). Their plan? Robbing a low-stakes card game that’s flush with mob money. It’s a terrible plan, as stupid as Jerry Lundegard’s dunderheaded scheme in “Fargo”. But the game itself was once set up by its own proprietor (an uncharacteristically tender Ray Liotta), and besides, the place is a money pit and there’s no way anyone would be stupid enough to pull the same reckless stunt twice.

Enter Jackie Cogan, (Brad Pitt, an Angel of Death with a wry sense of humor) a pragmatic enforcer who is assigned with taking out the underworld’s garbage and restoring “order”, if that’s the right world, to the gambling-fueled criminal economy. I use the word “economy” because Dominik deftly uses the imbalance of power in the film’s narrative as a metaphor for the economic recession of 2008. It’s a bold decision, and one that struck many at the time as being wrong-headed. Viewed now, I would argue the film is as relevant as it was when first released — perhaps even more so. Some will no doubt might find the director’s tendency to include platitude-fueled CNN speeches from George W. Bush and Barack Obama in background scenes a bit on-the-nose, but let’s give the director some credit here: the guy’s not an idiot and it’s arrogant of us to assume that we’re telling him something he doesn’t already know. As I said earlier, I sincerely suspect that subtlety was never a priority for the filmmakers here. Their picture is more concerned with mood and impact. These nightmarish touches give the film real heft, not to mention a sort of grim real-world immediacy.

As he displayed in his masterpiece, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” — one of the best films of 2007, second only to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” and PTA’s immortal “There Will Be Blood” — Dominik is interested in the notion of the outlaw as a mythic figure, as well as the distinctly American capacity for glamorizing criminals and cannibalizing their misdeeds. He’s one of the more visually stylish directors working today, (one can only imagine what he would have done with Season Two of “True Detective) whether he’s bobbing the camera in and out of a gloomy heroin trip, staging one of the most upsetting scenes of physical assault in cinematic memory or watching bullet shatter a glass in slow-mo so that it looks like some sort of trippy, hanging art installation.

No matter how you feel about the film itself, the ensemble is like ’93-era Wu-Tang: not to be fucked with. Mendelsohn oozes his trademark smug villainy, Richard Jenkins displays comic timing so sharp it’s practically surgical as a stuttering mob lawyer and the late, great James Gandolfini imbues his role — of a depressed, recently divorced hood with a propensity for hookers, binge-drinking and self-pity — with a lifetime’s worth of personal history. Scoot McNairy, who has risen to become the character actor du jour as of late, handles his scenes with these big names like a consummate pr.o. His scene with Pitt is an understated marvel of fear-suffused silences and creeping dread, a welcome reminder of why Dominik’s subdued look at the criminal lifestyle is so much more interesting then the gloating and tiresome machismo of his counterparts. All the while, Pitt floats above the chaos like a desolate angel in Aviator shades. “Killing Them Softly” also attracted critical ire for what many saw as cringingly obvious use of pop music. Again, it’s a decision I find myself compelled to defend: once again, it’s all totally obvious, but the cues here lend Dominik’s film a bouncy, borderline-goofy energy that prevent grim self-parody from seeping through the cracks. Among the choice cuts are The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” (played during, you guessed it, a heroin trip), an upbeat rendition of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters (Straight From Your Heart)”. This last song is so well-deployed here that it almost makes you forget that it was used to better effect in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, apparently one of Dominik’s favorite films.

“Killing Them Softly” was never going to be for the multiplex crowd. A film with this kind of narrow focus and ugly view of humanity will probably never find an audience beyond the niche. This film is a film that flaunts its scars. It is bleak, offensive, shockingly violent, almost totally hopeless and miles away from subtle. It’s also a warped, live-wire political cartoon, a crackling tale of America’s urban underbelly and maybe even one of the best films of the decade. It’s a hate letter straight to your heart.