After The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Ford, making a modern crime thriller almost half the length of his western seemed like an odd career direction for Andrew Dominik. However, Killing Them Softly turned out to be one of the best movies in recent years, even if audiences may not have reacted overly keenly it. Telling a recession-era gangster story with Obama's election campaign explicitly playing out in the background, it almost comes across as a film with a heavy-handed message, but that's exactly the point. Throughout the film these seismic social changes are occurring, but the big-time crooks are too self-involved, happier maintaining their self-destructive day-to-day lives, to really pay attention. It's only Brad Pitt's Jackie Cogan who lets it register, and even then it's only in angered acceptance. Beyond that, Killing Them Softly is a masterclass in switching perspective. Not only does it follow various narrative strands, but in a literary-inspired trick each scene is stylistically viewed from one character's point of view. Take the various killing scenes - when hit-man Cogan's on the job it's beautifully shot in slow-mo, but when it's incompetent goons beating a man half to death the editing is sloppy, making each hit feel incompetently delivered. Heck, one scene even has the perspective switching from antsy criminal (quick cuts, naturalistic framing) to fazed out stoner (lengthy shots, blurred image) on a shot-by-shot basis. That's a ballsy trick to attempt, let alone pull off.
