The first moments of the film-- and my pick for best moment in film this year-- shreds a particularly hopeful speech by then candidate Barack Obama, intercutting it with squelches of static and periods of silence as a low rent gangster walks through a blighted Boston neighborhood while dueling Obama and McCain campaign posters dominate the landscape around him. This sequence, dense with meaning, clearly establishes that the rhetoric (and even most of the actions) of our political leaders have very little impact on the lives of most everyday citizens and draws the parallel between the actions taking place on the national stage in the background and the actions of the low level gangsters occupying the foreground.
Though it eventually goes much deeper, Killing Them Softly operates largely as an allegory for the economic crisis that began in the fall of 2008 and continues to today. The main plot of the film concerns the takedown of a back room poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta, still terrific under all that plastic surgery), an allegorical stand-in for a big Wall Street bank (Lehman Brothers, specifically). Any time one of the games gets hit, it crashes the whole illegal gambling scene for months (i.e. the larger economy). This has already happened once before. Markie had taken down his own game, made a big score and later had a good laugh about it once the games were going strong again (i.e. once he had been bailed out). The guys looking to hit his game now figure that if it happens again, everyone will blame Markie and they can waltz off with $30 or $40K.
Sure enough, this is what happens at first. They knock over the game and Markie is punished and eventually killed (just as Lehman Brothers was allowed to wither and die). In one of the film’s standout moments, Markie is murdered in gloriously operatic slow-motion. It’s an epic, attention-grabbing scene shot and edited that way to reflect the impact of the message Markie’s murder is supposed to be sending to the Boston underworld, i.e. this is what happens when you mess with the system. That was supposed to be the message of Lehman Brothers, too. But as with the economic crisis, Markie’s death isn’t enough to bring everyone back to the games (i.e. keep the economy from cratering), so further steps have to be taken.
This is the turning point in Killing Them Softly, where the film transitions from an allegory for the economic crisis to a scathing critique of the way our political leaders handled the crisis and, by extension, the culture of American political leadership in general. Our leaders (at least in the eyes of the filmmakers, though they make a very good argument) refused to make any difficult decisions or undertake any drastic measures to change things, allowing the culprits to go largely unpunished and leaving the system largely unchanged. But in the ‘real’ world, the world of the gangsters, that is simply not an option. And as Killing Them Softly depicts the difficult and disruptive actions the gangsters undertake, the empty rhetoric and feckless actions of the politicians plays in the background, bringing into sharp relief the difference between empty words and meaningful actions.
This turning point is clearly marked in a scene that introduces Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan, the man hired by the gangsters running the gambling operation to fix the problem and get everyone playing again. Jackie’s only contact with these higher-ups is through Richard Jenkins’s middleman. As they meet for the first time in this scene, John McCain’s speech about suspending his campaign to deal with the economic crisis plays in the background. Political speeches are used in place of music throughout the film to show both the parallels and the disconnects between the political world and the one we’re watching. Up until this moment, the speeches had largely served either to show how irrelevant such rhetoric was to the lives of these characters or to draw direct parallels between the underground economy of the poker games and the economy at large. From this point on, however, the speeches begin to reveal the differences in the ways real people and political leaders react to similar problems and, by extension, to indict those politicians for their lack of real leadership. Unlike the course of action suggested by McCain, real people don’t have the option of suspending their lives to deal with difficult situations.
The pervasiveness of the political rhetoric-- featured in the background on TVs, in cars or just on the soundtrack-- at first appears a bit heavy-handed, until, that is, the realization eventually dawns that the content of these speeches isn’t just Andrew Dominik revealing the themes of the film; these speeches are really what the film is about. They’re not subtext meant to be casually digested in the background; they’re just as much text as the murders and robberies we’re watching on screen. You might even be better served by listening very carefully to the film while watching it only casually.
As Jackie goes about cleaning up the mess created by the takedown of Trattman’s game, it becomes clearer that Obama is going to win the election and his oratory (at least that featured here) becomes ever more lofty and unifying-- and thus, in the eyes of this deeply cynical film, ever more dishonest and insincere. It’s a bitter, angry outlook that culminates in the film’s final scene. After killing everyone involved with the robbery, Jackie meets the middleman at a dive bar to collect his payment. It’s the night of the election and, on the television above the bar, Obama is giving his victory speech. The middleman seems to be at least partly buying what Obama’s selling but Jackie’s having none of it. And when the middleman tries to shortchange Jackie, he summarizes the film’s main themes in one brilliant line: ‘America’s not a country; it’s a business. Now fuckin’ pay me.’
Killing Them Softly is a deeply cynical film seething with anger and frustration at the lack of accountability and courage in our political leadership. The American public is routinely promised real meaningful change (at least once every four years) and, when that change never materializes, no one is ever held accountable. Because of this lack of accountability, no one in a leadership position has the courage to do the difficult things that need to be done. Jackie Cogan is the sort of man who takes those difficult actions and accepts that accountability. And, by extension, Killing Them Softly is a film that has nothing but contempt for leaders who won’t take similar actions and for a system that rewards them for their cowardice. Whether or not you agree with that attitude, there’s no denying the power and artistry with which the film makes its case.
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