Five years on, Pitt has teamed up with Dominik again, producing as well as starring in this adaptation of George V Higgins’s 1974 crime novel, Cogan’s Trade, set, like all Higgins’s work, in Boston, where he practised as a lawyer. His books major on dialogue, protracted and elaborate conversations between the characters conveying the action often quite remotely. Higgins is the Henry James of crime writers.
Interestingly, Dominik says that what attracted him to the novel was the “very simple plot”, along with the great characters and dialogue. A pair of dumb young criminals rob a card game, although they know it is Mafia-protected. Jackie Cogan, an enforcer, is sent in to dispatch not just this pair but the dimwit who gave them the idea and the hapless wiseguy who was running the card game, whether or not he was at fault. That’s the story.
What Dominik obviously likes about such simplicity is the opportunity it offers him to riff at length. He relishes long talkative scenes between the criminals, filming sequences in high style (a balletic shooting in slow motion, a druggie drifting in and out of consciousness), and using ironically appropriate pop songs on the soundtrack. He pitches the whole story of greed and cheating against the financial crash of 2008 by the simple device of having Obama, Bush and McCain speeches about it constantly playing on background radio and television to provide a running commentary. As the card game is knocked over we hear “this is an extraordinary period for America’s economy”. As Pitt arrives to sort the mess, we’re told, “there’s been a widespread loss of confidence”.
“I’ve always felt crime dramas are essentially about capitalism, since they show us the capitalist idea functioning in its most base form,” says Dominik. Maybe, maybe not. But any resonance is not enhanced by being so poundingly underlined as it is here, in scene after scene.
This over-emphasis is duplicated in the soundtrack. When Pitt appears we’re treated to Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, which one can hardly hear too often, but then we get Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries during a beating and Heroin while the drug is being injected. It’s heavyhanded and it’s sub-Tarantino. A film that promises at the start to be hugely enjoyable becomes steadily less so as you realise it’s more of a talkie than a movie.
Scoot McNairy (the hero in Monsters) and Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom) play the dim robbers — and Mendelsohn is absolutely terrific as a really filthy, degenerate addict, barely aware of his surroundings half the time, mumbling nasty rubbish about women and dogs, bizarrely compelling none the less. There’s a scene where he goes to the station locker where he keeps his stash, stoned out of his mind, and just his walk makes you laugh out loud.
As the luckless manager of the card game, Ray Liotta uses all that trust we have in him as our most regular gangster without actually lapsing into likeability. There’s a fine extended cameo for James Gandolfini (who played Tony Soprano) as a hitman, formerly feared, now a drunken sex-addict, facing jail, fearing impotence, bloated, repellent and ineffective. (The only female speaking part in the entire film, by the way, is, very briefly, a hooker he abuses.)
Post a Comment