1) Killing Them Softly
Killing Them Softly is a movie everyone should probably revisit, including myself, because it doesn’t completely make sense until literally its final moment. The bulk of the movie works to give a vague sense of things it’s trying to do, casting James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta in roles that are meant to evoke their previous portrayals of hard gangsters and then proceeding to completely invert those perceptions of these men in this new American environment. On top of that there’s some of the best sound of any movie in the last year, making the violence real and painful for us to watch, another signal that this was a movie being made in the spirit of the 1970s gangster movies but with a contemporary sense of realism.
Brad Pitt delivers the closing monologue of the movie though, and it’s a wonderful scene, concluding rather abruptly but this just adds to its perfection, the timing of that last cut providing just the right punctuation for the final words he speaks. The thematic intentions of the movie don’t seem quite as obvious to me as they apparently did to other viewers, but I think it’s because many of its signals are obvious even if their meanings are more obscure, and so people interpreted this as a lack of subtlety.
The last scene is key, I think, to clarifying the point of all these obvious details. It’s blatantly juxtaposed with the hopeful message being delivered on a television by Barack Obama, intended to emphasis the lofty nature of the newly elected president’s words with the disastrous state of the country’s economy. Likewise, Pitt’s character essentially points out that the romanticized view of gangster life is yet another American myth that runs counter to the reality of how both realms, politics and crime, tend to work: as a cynical business. All of a sudden, the movie is as clear as day, but only in retrospect—a neat little trick by under-appreciated director Andrew Dominik.