Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Killing Them Softly
2012 · Andrew Dominik · Killing Them Softly on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen to the radios and televisions playing behind the dialogue. (sound)
Bush, Paulson, McCain and Obama run through car speakers, barroom sets and gas station forecourts in nearly every public space. They talk about confidence, credit and collective responsibility while the men in frame argue about who owes what.
Payoff: The picture shows men robbing each other and the soundtrack shows a country using the same vocabulary, and the two never quite separate. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. Sound and image running two stories across a gap is what the reading calls audiovisual disjunction.
Count the scenes that are two men talking across a table. (staging)
Most of the film is a parked car or a booth. Fraser frames cramped two-shots that trap the men opposite each other, and Dominik keeps Higgins's overlapping, digressive talk running long past where another crime film would cut.
Payoff: Talk is the actual transaction in this world, so the negotiation is the scene rather than the setup for one.
Look at the sodium light and the wet empty lots. (light)
The palette is desaturated and bilious. Institutional greens and browns in the bars, black water on asphalt, orange street light. Norris fills the backgrounds with shuttered stores, debris and bailout-era signage.
Payoff: The décor announces a system that has stopped working before anyone in the film says a word about the economy.
Notice how long a conversation runs before anything happens. (cutting)
Kates and Horstmann refuse to accelerate. Scenes breathe, digress and circle. Dread comes from how long you wait rather than from cutting speed, and when violence lands the rhythm breaks completely.
Payoff: Tedious process and sudden consequence get different clocks, which is how the film keeps crime looking like work.
Watch how little Pitt moves while he talks. (performance)
Cogan is played as a professional with no swagger. He listens, prices the job, explains his preference for killing from a distance so he does not have to deal with people getting emotional about it.
Payoff: Even the murder is presented as a service with a fee attached, which is the film's flattest joke and its thesis.
Once you have seen it
Watch the glass and the rain during the slow-motion killing. (camera)
Fraser shoots it at high frame rate with forensic clarity while Ketty Lester sings Love Letters. Every shard, drop and shell casing is given its own beat. It is the most beautiful passage in the film.
Payoff: The scene is staged to be looked at rather than to resolve anything, and the pleasure it gives you is the point being made. In the reading: attraction-image. A set-piece lifted out of the chain of events to be admired for itself is what the reading calls an attraction-image.
Watch Gandolfini's body in the hotel room scenes. (performance)
Mickey drinks, complains, talks about women and money, and never kills anyone on screen. Gandolfini plays him as the wreck of the gangster figure he himself made famous, and Dominik lets him sit there for whole scenes.
Payoff: The slump is the argument. A whole mythology is shown finished without a line of dialogue explaining it. In the reading: the-gest. A posture that lays bare a social position instead of advancing a plot is what the reading calls a gest.
Notice that the final scene is an argument about money. (structure)
No shootout closes the film. It ends in a bar with two men disagreeing about what America is, and the last line prices the whole story out loud. Everything before it was that line in advance.
Payoff: The genre exercise is converted into a statement, which is why the ending frustrates anyone waiting for the payoff a crime film owes.
Look at the vacant lots and shuttered stores behind the actors. (setting)
Higgins set his novel in Boston. Dominik shot it in a post-Katrina New Orleans of water-stained underpasses, empty lots and debris, and left the damage in the frame rather than dressing it away.
Payoff: The real city's ruin does the film's arguing for it, so the allegory is standing in the background of every conversation.
Carry this in: Turn up the radios. The film keeps telling you what the men in the cars are too busy to hear.