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Rating: An armed robbery is a clockwork device where every cog must move in the right way at the right time. The plan for a heist is a mechanism made of gears, levers, and switches that must turn, rise or fall, turn on or off, only when, and only if, necessary.
For his third full-length device ('56), the twenty-seven-year-old Kubrick assigns the role of cogs to five miserable men, five losers who seem to have been picked from the back rows of noir stereotypes: Johnny, an ex-convict with nothing left to lose (played by the imperturbable mask of Sterling Hayden), George, a timid cashier, weak and mediocre (the excellent Elisha Cook Jr.), Mike, an elderly bartender (Joe Sawyer), Randy, a policeman hunted by loan sharks (Ted DeCorsia), and Marvin, an old man (whose homosexuality is suggested) with some money saved, lonely and with a drinking habit (Jay C. Flippen). Five poor men, devoid of the disillusioned charm that often accompanies protagonists of gangster movies, who decide to execute the heist of a lifetime: steal the racetrack's takings by exploiting a distraction during the seventh race, the most anticipated of the season.
We will never know how or when they locked into each other, nor why they were chosen precisely as the cogs. But Kubrick takes us into their homes and lives with quick lateral tracking shots, follows them one by one, until revealing what motivated them to become part of this machinery: unhappiness and dissatisfaction, the desire to make a change in their lives. A motive that finds its charge in sometimes petty needs (Randy's thirst for wealth), sometimes foolish and naive (George's blind and obstinate love for a greedy woman who doesn't love him and enjoys humiliating him), but also affectionate (the hope, for the elderly bartender, to finally afford treatments for his sick wife) and romantic (the desire for redemption, to make "the heist of a lifetime" for the protagonist). And above all, the (need for) dream of a better life, the hope of finally turning the page and escaping the mediocrity that had characterized their lives thus far.
The mechanism of the robbery relies on a delicate equilibrium, calculated to the second. To best represent its operation, it is necessary to highlight its synchronicity, the concert and harmony with which each cog must turn and allow others to perform their task. The robbery is not a chess game where each piece can move autonomously, but a complicated puzzle where each piece must be in the right place at the right time. That's why Kubrick decides to subordinate time and plot to his purposes. Not so much as, just a couple of years before, the Emperor Kurosawa had done in the masterpiece "Rashomon" ('54), by reprising the same story through the eyes of each character, but playing a Shanghai game with the linearity of the typical gangster movie plot, breaking the unity of the story into as many pieces as there are protagonists.
In "The Killing," events are shown to us once and only once (with the only exception of the brawl scene..), but with continuous "time jumps," narrative restarts, and alternating flashbacks and flashforwards, allowing us to follow the deeds of all the participants in the robbery, even if they are carried out simultaneously (or at least at the same time of day), but in different places. Like in a refined game of "stop-fast rewind-play", the real-time in which events unfold (also punctually marked by the voiceover) is continuously interrupted, rewound, and restarted. Thus, the working mechanism of the heist is ingeniously unveiled, the viewer is made part of every secret, every trick, and every weak point of the plan, engaged in the same game of unforeseen events, fears and anxieties, expectations and machinations of which the individual protagonists of the story are victims.
As mentioned, the plan itself is almost perfect. The device has been designed in the best possible way, and every cog has worked well. Yet..
Yet there is something that escapes every plan, something that seems impossible to force into our forecasts. Perhaps it's just fate, in front of which it's senseless to try to escape, that proverbial "irony of fate," the destiny that loves to wear the strangest garments just to mock us and our dreams: a suitcase that won't close, a mischievous little dog, the whirling blades of an airplane...
Or maybe it's just the weakness and pettiness of the human soul, the unpredictability of the gestures and actions of those who have always wanted to see themselves free from their sad and mediocre existence, and now feel one step away from happiness. It's betrayal, it's naivety and greed. All the characters in "The Killing" display, to a varying degree, their flaws and weaknesses: for some, one drink too many makes them defy the boss's orders, for others, it's their ineptitude as a man and husband. For one, it's being a less-than-exemplary cop, for others, it's simply an excess of confidence, repeating past mistakes. Flaws and weaknesses that no plan, no matter how clever and detailed, can ever truly predict, avoid, or hope to erase. As if that motive, made of a desire for redemption and retribution, which had gathered the gang, revealed itself to be too charged at the time of reckoning. So charged that it destroys the fragile balance on which the entire mechanism rested.
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