Posts Tagged ‘KILLING THEM SOFTLY’

THE COUNSELOR: 2 ½ STARS. “Bleak and hopeless, it’s an ice-cold crime drama.”

the-counselor10“The Counselor” is the feel bad movie of the year.

Bleak and hopeless, it’s an ice-cold crime drama that examines the reasons and consequences of crime instead of focusing on the crime itself. It’s a stylish cautionary tale about the worst of human behavior driven by greed, lust and hubris; a non-action, action movie where most of the fireworks are in McCarthy’s dialogue. Luckily actors like Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Rosie Perez and Michael Fassbender are there to keep the fuse lit.

In Cormac ‘No Country for Old Men’ McCarthy’s screenwriting debut he tells a gritty story about a greedy lawyer (Fassbender) in over his head after dipping his toe into the narcotics trade with charismatic drug lord Reiner (Bardem) and his sociopath girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz).

When the deal, smuggling carrying 625 kilos of cocaine from Mexico to Chicago, goes south after one “we’ve got a problem” phone call, the Counselor finds his life swirling out of control.

Spiraling around this grim vortex are womanizing middle-man Westray (Pitt), prison inmate Ruth (Rosie Perez) and the counselor’s long-distance girlfriend Laura (Penélope Cruz).

In “The Counselor” director Ridley Scott mutes his usual high-octane visual sense to focus on the words.

And there’s a lot of them.

Talky to the extreme, the entire movie is built around dialogue that sounds like it flowed from the hardest boiled crime writer out there, which I guess McCarthy is now that Elmore Leonard is working from his celestial typewriter. Catch phrases abound—“You don’t know someone until you know what they want,” for example—but it is wordy. Sometimes brilliantly so, but the pacing, particularly in the first hour, will be thought of as hypnotic by some, slow by others.

Scott takes his time creating tension in every scene, which really begins to pay off in the second hour when the themes of truth or consequences really start to pay off. “If you think you can live in this world and not be part of it, you’re wrong,” the Counselor is told, just after it’s too late to change his fate.

Or the most part the acting is top notch. Fassbender’s shift from confident criminal to a man who lands himself in a world of trouble after doing a good deed gives a nakedly raw performance. As his desperation grows his defenses drop and the weight of what he did in the name of greed crushes him.

Perez and Pitt (who’s in his “Killing Them Softly” mode here) are both fine, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else describing a “gynecological” love scene between a woman and a car with as much strange gusto as Bardem. “You see something like that,” he says, “and it changes you.”

These actors bring the words to life. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Diaz, whose cold-blooded take on the character is too detached to be truly effective.

Like “Killing Them Softly,” another thriller that relied on dialogue and ideas to provide the thrills instead of gunshots and explosions, “The Counselor” will polarize people. Some will find it a head scratcher, others will be drawn into its uncompromising look at life and death, cartel style.

Still others, like me, will be left half in, half out, wishing the film’s virtues—it’s dialogue and ideas—were propped up with just a bit more attention to plot and possibly some warmth. But the chilliness of the story and characters may be McCarthy’s point. Early on Malkina says, “I don’t think truth has a temperature,” which sums McCarthy’s ice cold look at primal, criminal behavior.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY: 3 ½ STARS

killing-them-softly-poster-headerThe storyline of “Killing Them Softly” sounds like something straight out of Martin Scorsese’s playbook but it is the execution (pun intended) that makes it a singular experience. The title may recall the name of Roberta Flack’s most famous song, but instead of being about metaphorical love, the movie is a cynical anti-thriller allegory about America’s economic crisis.

Set in the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency, just as he passed the baton to Barack Obama in 2008, the movie begins with two small time crooks, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) hired by crime boss Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola) to hold up a secret, high-stakes poker game overseen by low level mobster Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). The criminal corporation responsible for the game suspects Trattman, but brings in no-nonsense enforcer Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to get to the bottom of the situation.

“Killing Them, Softly” isn’t your godfather’s gangster movie. Talky, deliberate and willfully obtuse, it is less a crime thriller than it is a wordy mediation on recession-era life in the underworld and beyond. The movie’s point-of-view is reinforced by wild sound news broadcasts that pepper the soundtrack and long conversations between Jackie and Driver (Richard Jenkins), a mouthpiece for the criminal organization who seems to be terminally tied up by red tape.

Their scenes and back-and-forth are the film’s most entertaining moments. The humdrum tone belies their conversation’s deadly subject matter and is played to great effect. And that is the beauty of this movie.

Director Andrew “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” Dominik’s visual flair keeps things interesting—a druggy conversation between Frankie and Russell is masterfully represented—but it is the actors who provide the spark.

Liotta brings real pathos to Markie the unfortunate scapegoat and McNairy and Mendelsohn both have a small time reek about them but as strong as they are, its Pitt, Jenkins and James Gandolfini who will linger in your memory.

Jenkins is an anonymous bureaucrat, a cog in the wheel that helps his criminal organization go round, and underplays the role beautifully. The temptation may have been to dirty the character up a bit, but Jenkins plays him straight as a man whose business dirty, but a business nonetheless.

Gandolfini is as wild as Jenkins is buttoned-down. A hitman for hire, he’s more interested in call girls and booze than killing people. It’s hard not to see echoes of Tony Soprano in this troubled killer, but Gandolfini is too skilled to repeat himself. His menace is tempered by self-doubt, and his scenes with Pitt shine.

At the helm, however, is Pitt. Heralded to screen by Johnny Cash’s “When The Man Comes Around,”—”There’s a man going round taking names / And he decides who to free and who to blame.”—he’s a pragmatic psychopath, a ruthless killer who doesn’t like the up-close-and-personal stuff. “I like to kill them softly,” he says. “From a distance; not close enough for feelings.” It’s a complex character, one defined in this movie by his words and not his actions, and Pitt handles it effortlessly.

“Killing Them Softly” won’t be for everyone. More brains than brawn it is about the tension of knowing what’s coming next, and while it does deliver in its violent scenes, it is a film that values ideas more than action. It’s edgy stuff, well handled by Dominik—although using the Velvet Underground song “Heroin” to intro an injection scene seems too standard for a movie like this—but will leave many viewers wondering when Brad Pitt will lose the art house pretentions and get back into the blockbuster business.