'Killing Them Softly': Dial M for Metaphor

In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, Brad Pitt plays the grim undertaker of America’s hopes and dreams. Walking smoothly through his tasks as a hit man for the mob, the actor is often accompanied by audio snippets of the political fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. Speeches by George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Barack Obama serve as the background drone to his spectacular violence, suggesting an uneasy connection between the plot’s mob robbery gone wrong and an economy circling the drain. On the eve of the 2008 election, Pitt’s character refers to candidate Obama on TV: “This guy wants to tell me that we’re living in a community,” he says. “I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business.”

At its outset, the story is all about economic Darwinism: Two young hoodlums—brooding, ambitious Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and sweaty Australian dog-thief Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—join in on a small-time operator’s plan to hold up a mob-protected card game. In an impressively tense scene, they do so, but the fallout turns out to be a bit more than anybody anticipated. The guy sent by the mob to clean things up turns out to be Jackie Cogan (Pitt), a man who claims compassion for his victims (he prefers to “kill them softly,” without a lot of fuss and mess) but also has an uncanny habit of leaving gruesome corpses in his path.