Parked underneath an overpass, a hit man looks out the window, surveying a bleak American landscape. The nation is, in a word, screwed. “There’s a plague coming,” Jackie (Brad Pitt) declares early on in “Killing Them Softly.”
It’s 2008, and on radios and televisions, a young senator from Illinois is promising a new era of hope in the wake of the rubble from the financial crisis. Hasn’t disaster already struck?
More is yet to come is the 2012 movie’s unsettling premonition. Together, the five entries from this month’s column take stock of how we got here. From the early 1800s to the 2016 election season, from postwar to post-recession trauma, you will see the arc of a country that bends from opportunity to opportunism.
These movies revolve around strongmen and grifters, hit men and con men, and the idea of an American dream that belies perhaps a truer guiding tenet: screw or be screwed. Still, there’s room, if you believe in it, to strive for something else, to look out for one another, to hold people close.
Stream it on PlutoTV.
There’s a simple scene in this film, set in 19th-century Oregon Territory, in which an Englishman explains his horrifying logic around slave labor to a room, including an American ship captain, three Native Americans, a Chinese striver and an American laborer. It’s an unshowy, effortlessly potent snapshot of the American project and a microcosm of the delicate brilliance of Kelly Reichardt’s film. Few movies can tell the story of the United States and our foundational truths — of commerce and plunder — with such quiet power; even fewer can be so shrewd while remaining so tender.
On its face, “First Cow” is about a friendship between two loners, one a chatty enterpriser named King-Lu (Orion Lee), another a meek baker named Cookie (John Magaro), who start selling fried dough out of a single pan to mud-caked settlers. But theirs is the story of uniquely American possibility and exploitation, of gritty survival and an unlikely gentleness.
“History isn’t here yet,” King-Lu announces, observing this land of abundance. Perhaps, when it arrives, “we can take it on our own terms.” It is still up to us, Reichardt seems to say, to choose what those terms are.
Stream it on Plex.
Upon its release, “Killing Them Softly” might have read as a heavy-handed, cynical crime allegory. By the film’s darkly funny, sobering end, one can now see that it’s instead a matter-of-fact attempt to puncture the bubble of Obama era-optimism that many were still blissfully hiding in (the film takes place amid the 2008 election, and was released weeks after former President Obama’s 2012 victory).
Energized by a remarkably sturdy cast (headlined by Pitt), the film follows a robbery that ripples across a local crime economy. Soon, a hit man, directed by a sad-sack bureaucrat who works for unseen higher-ups, is brought in.
Around them is a post-recession wasteland: empty highways, derelict houses and bags of smack. Hustlers are out there for themselves, while in the background, politicians are promising change and touting American resilience. But take a bird’s-eye view of this ecosystem: Between the two-bit enforcers and the ones pulling the strings, who are the real crooks?
Stream it on Tubi.
Sean Baker’s precursor to the Oscar-winning “Anora” was this under-the-radar film about a different kind of sex worker, a washed-up porn star named Mikey (Simon Rex) who has returned to his hometown in Texas.
Mikey sees everyone around him as a means to an end, but he’s a charming dirtbag whose seemingly cartoonish ineptitude often gets him a version of what he wants. He weasels his way back into his estranged wife’s life and begins grooming a 17-year-old cashier named Strawberry (Suzanna Son), seeing her as his ticket back into the industry.
Looming in the backdrop are oil refineries and billboards promising to make America great again. Allusions are made to the nearby Texas Killing Fields, where women’s bodies were discovered in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as historic sites of the slave trade — a swinging pendulum of violent exploitation. Mikey might be a small wrecking ball, but he’s of a pervasive strain of predatory narcissists, American-bred rockets who, hurtling through lives, only seem to gather speed.
As we reckon with the manosphere, you might recognize its core appeal in Paul Thomas Anderson’s astonishing, hypnotizing masterwork about the push and pull of masculinity, power and control.
Coming home from World War II, Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) is a troubled and traumatized drifter, thrashing about like a wounded animal when anyone gets too close. Then he meets Lancaster (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a magnetic leader marshaling alternative histories and remedies, but driven most of all by directing others to follow his every word.
Their connection is a twisted love story, providing a mesmerizing study in how some disaffected men — impulsive, lost, sneering at authority — are in fact those most likely to gravitate toward assertive male figureheads. Come for all of that, but stay for Anderson, Phoenix and Hoffman, giants of contemporary American cinema at their best.
Stream it on Tubi.
The raw power of this war film concerning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia lies not in its depiction of genocidal violence, but rather in the excruciating sense of helplessness as the innocent see the unspeakable coming.
During the war, Aida, a former schoolteacher, works as a United Nations translator who is hoping to broker safety for her family and town. Most of the film takes place inside an overcrowded U.N. military base, a massive warehouse where a lucky few, including Aida, have been able to take shelter when Serbian forces begin a violent siege.
Played with engrossing fury by Jasna Djuricic, Aida is mostly seen sprinting back and forth, desperately bargaining for her family’s safety. At the helm of this invasion is Gen. Ratko Mladic (Boris Isakovic), whose demeanor is that of a cavalier bully who saunters around, lies to his victims and directs a camera crew to capture the reality he fabricates.
