Brad Pitt (The Weinstein Company)

“He’s gonna get in a whore fight at a hotel that don’t like whore fights.” I mulled over that line from Killing them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominick, for days before I fully appreciated it. The movie is based on George V. Higgin’s 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade, which runs a slim 200 pages. The source for that line runs for some one hundred words. Dominick whittled it down to its essence in fifteen. Brad Pitt makes it, if not poetry, great hard boiled movie dialogue.

The writer/editor is like a killer, mercilessly removing dead wood, and Cogan (Brad Pitt) and writer/director Dominick both take this as their task in the name of restoring order: in the South Boston underworld, and in a movie. Major motion pictures that don’t clock in at two and a half hours are becoming a rarity, so Andrew Domink (whose previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was an excellent if long160 minutes) shepherds us into the Christmas season with a taut 97 minute entertainment that’s nasty, brutish and short. And one of the best movies of the year.

Killing Them Softly follows small time thugs as they stumble on a hit they figure can’t miss: a mob card game run by Markie (Ray Liotta). You see, Markie held up his own game, so if it gets hit again, they’ll think it’s him, right? But this leads to disorder among thieves, and Cogan is sent in to put things in their place.

Pitt is introduced by a Johnny Cash number, and Dominik’s use of obvious pop songs are the film’s weak link. I mean, sure, you don’t hear the lyrics of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” during a hazy shoot-up scene, but that opening guitar is a surprising cliche in a movie that mostly eschews the obvious.

Ben Mendelsohn and Scott McNairy (The Weinstein Company)

Much of the movie (with a few crucial exceptions) is stripped down, from straightforward editing to a sound design that is mostly music free. But the movie is not without pretentions. It opens with a sequence that is part Taxi Driver and part Jean-Luc Godard. Frankie (Scott McNairy) walks through a desolate urban landscape while a Barack Obama campaign speech (circa 2008) plays, with the opening titles breaking into the sound and visuals in sudden discordant cuts. Godard used such techniques to alienate the viewer, but Dominik uses them to convey a fractured, hopelessly alienated America. The people of Killing them Softly are immune to Hope – whoever is in charge doesn’t change their plight.

That campaign speech is another pretension, as the whole film is built around the 2008 campaign and the impending financial crisis. Characters listen to news reports on the radio or watch them on tv, the sounds of CNN and George W. Bush replacing a conventional musical score. Maybe real mobsters would be listening to Wiz Khalifa, but the news reports add to the film’s tension and build to an incredibly cynical finale. A more subtle political connection is made during a critical scene that seems to reference the tracking shot that followed Bill Clinton as he made his final speech as president at the 2008 Democratic National Convention

Dominik’s Jesse James film found a fatalistic poetry (and inspired a Yogi Bear parody) in the myth of the American West. Killing them Softly offers a bleak view of the American myth of the present.

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Killing them Softly
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik
With Brad Pitt, Scott McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini.
Running time 97 minutes
Rated R for violence, sexual references, pervasive language, and some drug use
Opens today at a multiplex near you.