Writer-director John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing begins, as more than a few crime films do, with a man on death row recalling what put him there. Staring down his impending demise, Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) imparts a convoluted confession to a prison priest. The presiding sense of familiarity in this framing device is a savvy feint, easing us into a film with more than a few tricks and complications up its sleeve.
Becket’s misfortunes began with his very conception, the product of a tryst between a teenage heiress (Nell Williams) and a lowly cellist (Damien Wantenaar). His mother, glimpsed in an extended flashback, is booted from her billionaire family’s estate when she refuses an abortion. The unplanned child is soon orphaned, turned away from the gilded manse via sympathy card, and left to languish in foster care. His mother’s dying wish to be buried in the family tomb is ignored, and her last words, beseeching her son to never give up until he’s recovered what he’s owed, doom him to a life of embittered, relentless, and eventually homicidal striving.
This setup is Dickensian, so it should come as no surprise that characters make extended reference to David Copperfield. But the film’s follow-through—in which Becket sets about pruning the family tree, stumbles toward genuine contentment with an out-of-the-blue dream girl (Jessica Henwick), and gets lassoed back to crime by his conniving childhood crush (Margaret Qualley)—is a constellation of disparate influences. At once a lush homage to classic noir and a cynical twist on the bildungsroman, this pressurized picaresque also boasts a visual nod to Luis Buñuel (a rope slipped onto an unsuspecting limb, á la Él) and a spiritual one to Citizen Kane, with the Redfellow estate becoming a Xanadu-like symbol of bottomless opulence.
Most notably, Ford’s sophomore feature is a new take on Kind Hearts and Coronets, which gave rise to the British black comedy. In Robert Hamer’s classic, Dennis Price’s Louis Mazzini, in thrall to the dangled promise of a dukedom, knocks off the eight family members (all played by Alec Guiness) that precede him in the line of succession. The pitiless film’s sense of humanity plummets toward absolute zero, setting our bratty, calculating terminator against a rogues’ gallery of supercilious clods. More faithful to his source material in incident than in spirit, Ford takes a different tack, interpolating Kind Hearts and Coronets’s acrimonious aristocrats into a gauchely modern America and dragging the obscene rich down to earth (today’s billionaires, after all, go to great pains to convince the world that they’re “just like you”).
Ford also repurposes Louis Mazzini’s jaundiced hauteur, transforming a button-down killer into a more relatable ruffian. Though Becket, played with affable movie-star charisma by Hollywood’s leading man du jour, garners his fair share of sympathy throughout the script’s numerous twists of fate, he also elicits a healthy portion of schadenfreude.
This is a man who was sold the common narrative that he’s entitled to more. Think of it as the myth of merit that keeps the capitalist machine humming. Becket’s already-blinkered notion of success leads him down a zig-zagging path to ill-begotten fortunes of both finance and spirit, but we know from the get-go that none of them are built to last. Through it all, it’s just as thrilling to watch Becket succeed as it is to watch him make the wrong decision, and often these happen in the same instant. Becket is kept at just the right emotional distance from the viewer, with Powell’s taught visage prone to morphing from expressions of Patrick Bateman-esque sociopathy to those of pained humanity with a mere shift of the light.
Such shifts abound in How to Make a Killing, luminously shot by Todd Banhazl and directed by Ford with lithe precision. As in his terse first feature, Emily the Criminal, the camera moves with poise, but made on a larger budget and less beholden to the gritty realism that his previous effort entailed, How to Make a Killing is gleaming, its pristine surfaces implicitly conveying the rot beneath rampant decadence. The film looks extravagant, though the script is about as economical as one with an inherently episodic scenario can be. The tension occasionally slackens over the course of the film’s brisk 100 minutes, but the conclusion suggests, just in time, a patiently cranked wind-up toy, released with one cathartic twist of the knife.
Becket’s attempts to couch his story of avengement and avarice in gallows humor gradually crumble as he’s confronted by the sum of his actions. The brittle humanity of Ford’s characters is the key ingredient to his film’s grim sense of irony. In a media landscape replete with hot-button satires and airless farces, How to Make a Killing’s rejection of formal frippery and easy caricature is refreshing. Ford cultivates an old-school flair while keeping one finger on the pulse of the current moment, shrewdly retooling the canonical story of a rotten family patronage to comment on a quintessential American birthright: the compulsive desire for individual gain.
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