Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
As those of us hunkered down in our homes search for ways to simultaneously distract ourselves from and make sense of our current moment, we’re revisiting and evaluating whether movies such as 12 Monkeys, Outbreak, and Contagion have new relevance. Let me add another movie to the mix: 2012’s Killing Them Softly, written for the screen and directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Brad Pitt.
This may not be an obvious selection, even though at one point Pitt’s character suggestively intones, “There’s a plague coming.” This is not a movie about a contagious disease, unless you consider greed contagious. Nor is it a self-evident “pandemic pick,” especially considering its elevated levels of scuzziness, cynicism, and violence, all things which might jangle already-frayed nerves. Instead, think of it as a “discomfort watch.”
If you’re one of those people who, in times of turmoil, craves art equal in gravity to the moment, consider adding it to your Netflix list. Though it offers little in the way of escapism, the point it makes about America — namely, that we’re a country where consequences are unevenly distributed — is more relevant than ever.
Based on George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, the plot of the film is relatively simple. A pair of two-bit criminals played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn are hired by a third schlub (played by Vincent Curatola, who you’ll recognize from The Sopranos) to rob a mob-run card game. The guy who oversees the card game, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), isn’t in on the stickup, but he robbed his own game in the past and admitted to it, so the trio figures after they rob it, Markie will be blamed again, and they’ll be in the clear.
Brad Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, a “fixer” who is brought in by a mid-level mob exec (Richard Jenkins) to determine who is responsible for the latest stickup and mete out mob justice. Because the stickup men are, let’s say, strategy-challenged, it doesn’t take Jackie long to track them down. Significantly, Markie is also held responsible. Even if he didn’t rob his own game a second time, it’s not a good look for the mob, and so he, too, must be whacked.
James Gandolfini pops up as Mickey, a hitman who has gone to seed. He serves as a point of contrast to Pitt’s character’s lithe professionalism. Rocking a retro leather jacket and tinted sunglasses à la Fight Club and driving around in a classic American car à la Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt is in pretty boy cool mode here. At the end of the film, his work done, his character meets up with Jenkins’s character, who tries to chisel him out of what he’s owed. Pitt’s contemptuous monologue in response — which I won’t spoil because it’s worth seeing how the film sticks the landing yourself — functions as both cinematic denouement and cynical appraisal of the entire American project.
Whether the ending leaves you saying “F yeah!” or “WTF?,” it’s indisputable that the film is pretty bleak, leavened only by sporadic bits of dark humor. Indeed, his review of it, Andrew O’Hehir called it “one of the bleakest portraits of American society seen on-screen in the last several decades.”
But what critics upon its release seemed most vexed by wasn’t its bleakness, per se, but rather director Andrew Dominik’s choice to set the action in post-Katrina New Orleans in the fall of 2008 in the shadow of the McCain-Obama election and the developing financial crisis. Especially irksome to many critics was how Dominik situated the narrative by means of an extremely conspicuous sound design wherein the words of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and others drone in the background, sometimes only loosely anchored in the world of the film insofar as they seem to be emanating from actual radios and TVs. This struck many critics as clunky and pretentious.
“It’s a good thing these crooks are in a lot of bars where the television sets are tuned to C-SPAN,” sniffed Roger Ebert in his two-star review, sounding a common criticism.
But if the critics were selectively harsh, the moviegoing public was outright hostile. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an F, one of only 19 films ever to receive such a bad grade.
All told, Killing Them Softly only earned around $15 million domestically, which was about the same as it cost to make. In other words, not good. Keep in mind, too, that Brad Pitt was a huge star during this period. The year before, for instance, he appeared in The Tree of Life and Moneyball; the year after, he appeared in World War Z and 12 Years a Slave. Killing Them Softly, however, failed to make the same impact these films did, either critically or commercially, and it was Dominik who paid the price. For his crimes —namely, not getting a Brad Pitt-starring film to at least a $50MM domestic gross— this wildly talented filmmaker (see also: The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) was sent to “director’s jail”; he hasn’t had a feature film released commercially since.
Part of the reason for the movie’s failure to resonate with audiences, I suspect, has less to do with Dominik’s showy directorial choices than what he was trying to communicate with those choices. Killing Them Softly shuns the superficial optimism of the Obama years for an unsparring message: the United States is a country where ordinary people suffer consequences for their actions, but elites — in particular, bankers and politicians — often don’t. The movie plays better today, I feel like, precisely because such a message no longer seems as radical as it did during the “Yes, we can” era.
Indeed, what many critics found heavy-handed in 2012, I found, upon rewatching it recently, prescient. The juxtaposition it makes between low-level mobsters getting rubbed out for their screw-ups, and the political and financial elites whose voices and faces drift in and out of the film, and who as a class by and large escaped responsibility before, during, and after the 2008 financial crisis — just as they have crises before and since — seems to me the defining feature of the film. Moreover, there is a perverse sort of pleasure in seeing such a discrepancy stated so baldly, especially now, when similar discrepancies of outcomes are once again on full display in American life.
This message was always right there, of course — at the press conference after the film’s May 2012 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the Los Angeles Times quoted Pitt as saying, it was “criminal that there still haven’t been any criminal repercussions” for the bankers responsible for the financial crisis, presaging, perhaps, his appearance in The Big Short (2015) — but now, knowing what did and didn’t happen after the financial crisis and what still is or isn’t happening today, we might be more receptive to it.
I find Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of “skin in the game” a useful aid here. Taleb, who popularized the idea of “black swans” around the same time Killing Them Softly is set, and who Josh Hochschild calls “our most important contemporary theorist of chance, luck, and the vagaries of life,” expounds on this idea in his 2018 book of the same name. For Taleb, skin in the game is partly about “symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity.” He writes:
If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it. Just as you should treat others in the way you’d like to be treated, you would like to share the responsibility for events without unfairness and inequity.
In other words, having skin in the game is not “just having a share of the benefits”; rather, Taleb explains, “It is about symmetry, more like having a share of the harm, paying a penalty if something goes wrong.” Take the character of Markie Trattman from the film, for example. He might not be directly responsible for the card game getting knocked over a second time, but the fundamental rules of the world he lives in state that he is ultimately accountable.
Like Markie, the vast majority of people in the U.S. pay for their perceived wrongdoings. But a certain strata of people —including those whose soundbites pepper the film’s background— have, to a certain extent, inoculated themselves against ruin.
Elsewhere, for instance, Taleb points out that for some people after the 2008 financial crisis, there were not only no negative consequences, but benefits:
The bailouts of 2008–9 saved the banks (but mostly the bankers), thanks to the execution by then-treasury secretary Timothy Geithner who fought for bank executives against both Congress and some other members of the Obama administration. Bankers who lost more money than ever earned in the history of banking, received the largest bonus pool in the history of banking less than two years later, in 2010. And, suspiciously, only a few years later, Geithner received a highly paid position in the finance industry.
In contrast to Wall Street and Washington, the denizens of the criminal underworld in Killing Them Softly all have skin in the game — no reward comes without risk, and every risk might be your last. Most of us are like the characters in the film in the sense that we, too, have very little slack. 40% of Americans, to reference but one oft-cited stat, couldn’t cover an unexpected expense of $400 … and that was before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
In contrast to Wall Street and Washington, the denizens of the criminal underworld in Killing Them Softly all have skin in the game — no reward comes without risk, and every risk might be your last.
Via voices on radio and faces on TV, Dominik juxtaposes a world where everyone has skin in the game with a world where everyone clearly doesn’t. You might say the film posits that there are two Americas: one where you pay for your mistakes, the other where … eh, not so much. As MaryAnn Johanson keenly observes in her review of the film, “The implication left unspoken — but nevertheless impossible to avoid — is that the same thing that Jackie is up to needed to be done way up on the supposedly legitimate national and international level. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
Despite its mixed reviews and failure at the box office, Killing Them Softly makes for timely viewing. It speaks to our current moment as much as more obviously pandemic-themed films do. For America remains a nation in which risk is lopsided, a fact that becomes more apparent during crises, but one that we shouldn’t forget outside of them. Assuming, of course, that there will ever be such a time again.
Matt Thomas is a teacher and writer self-quarantining in Iowa City, IA.
