Brad Pitt’s film premieres at Cannes

The actor’s anti-capitalist gangster movie delivers a negative indictment of America.

CANNES:

Actor Brad Pitt returned to Cannes on Tuesday as a humane hitman in Killing Them Softly, an anti-capitalist gangster movie that condemns the state of the American nation, reports AFP.

The violent tale, which director Andrew Dominik insists is a comedy, has the star working for a mob syndicate run like any big US company, complete with incompetent middle management and brutal cost-cutting to cope with recession.

Pitt climbed Cannes’ red-carpeted steps for the gala premiere alongside the director and cast, but the other half of Hollywood’s hottest couple, his partner Angelina Jolie, was not with him.

As Hollywood royalty he’s an old pro at walking a red carpet and at the premiere, Pitt made the most of his star status. The 48-year-old actor arrived at the screening in Cannes looking effortlessly cool wearing black tie attire and a pair of gold aviator sunglasses.

The movie, which reunites Pitt with New Zealand-born Australian Dominik who directed him in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, combines highly stylised violence with a nostalgic American soundtrack.

The action unfolds just as the subprime mortgage crisis begins to wreak havoc on financial markets at the end of 2008, in the thick of the presidential election campaign that brought Barack Obama to power.

“It was an interesting way to look at the financial crisis,” Pitt, sporting shaggy blond-tinted hair and a goatee, told reporters after a press screening of the film that is competing with 21 other works for the Palme d’Or top prize.

He plays cynical mob enforcer Jackie Cogan who is called in to whack two low life, bumbling hoodlums — played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn — after they raid a high-stakes poker game among local gangsters.

(With additional information from Daily Mail)

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2012.

View pictures from 65th Cannes Film Festival here.