'You Kill Me': A Dead-On Regimen for Recovery

"I'm in Personnel," he tells people.

"Oh, you hire people?" he's asked.

"Well, it's more like I fire them," he explains.

Frank fires them by shooting them, usually in the head. He's the designated hit man for a small Polish crime family far from the hot action in Vegas or New York. He -- and his masters, the Krzeminskis -- are stuck in Buffalo, where since the stakes are so small, the action is really intense. The Krzeminskis are losing their turf in John Dahl's acerbic, mordant noir tickler, "You Kill Me." They're down to nothing but their snowplowing business, and you might think that would be big in Buffalo, but it's not, now that the Irish are muscling in, financed by the Chinese.

Anyhow, Frank's got more intimate problems, namely the quart of warm gin he drinks -- every half-hour. When he sleeps through a hit, the benevolent Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) orders that he be sent to San Francisco to dry out in a 12-step program.

That's the black joke at the center of "You Kill Me," expertly written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely: That if AA can restore fallen sinners to sainthood, it can also restore fallen saints to sinnerhood. The movie's about how Frank -- the great Ben Kingsley -- gets his groove back, and the groove is a Beretta 9mm.

"Hi, I'm Frank and I'm an alcoholic." It takes a lot of guts to say that, but Frank actually, and for the first time in his life, has help. He has friends. This being San Francisco, nobody's terribly judgmental, and when he tells them he kills people for a living, he usually gets a sympathetic, even tearful hug in return.

Taking the structure of the redemptive do-good story, Dahl tells a brilliant do-bad story. The moral polarities are neatly reversed, so that all the players and all the fans are united in their commitment to Frank's crusade. Frank, get back to killing. It's what you're really good at and your family needs you. It's like "Rocky" for existentialists.

Anyhow, in San Francisco, Frank gets a job (helped by smarmy Dave, played by Dahl regular Bill Pullman) in a funeral home, where it turns out he's got a gift, not merely for ending life but for manipulating the corpse -- oh, I mean, the loved one-- so that he or she looks better, albeit with veins full of formaldehyde and toes broken to get the shoes on, than when alive. At one service, Frank meets Laurel (Tea Leoni), a hip but not young San Francisco woman who's been around the block a time or 200, and she likes Frank's directness, while he likes her unflappability.

This is one of the greatest screwball relationships in years. Dahl is unsentimental about love, which is a form of intense sentimentality: Each of the two has been disappointed and betrayed so many times that expectations are lower than low. Each knows the other gets it when she looks at her loved one, an uncle, and confesses, "You know, I'm not that upset he's dead," and Frank counter-confesses, "I haven't quite mastered the mouth yet," and Dahl's camera shows us the old man's fraudulent smile highlighted by a heavy-handed clown grin of bright orange. Of such honesty only can great love be constructed.

Dahl is a wonderful filmmaker with a number of equally small-scale but superior crime-based entertainments. More commonly they're about predatory sociopaths and the innocent fools who get in their way ("The Last Seduction" with Peter Berg, Linda Fiorentino and Pullman, was the best.) His foray into big-budget filmmaking with "The Last Raid" was well executed but entirely lacking in personality. With "You Kill Me," he's back where he belongs, in a completely amoral world delivered with wit and incisiveness, and great twists.

Wonderful performances: I almost didn't mention another great, the always believable Dennis Farina as the Irish gang boss, avuncular and sleazy and wondrously malicious behind his phony bonhomie. I also liked the milieu: small city gang war, rooted in control over municipal service contracts, like snow plowing, the sort of thing you don't see in the glossier, more explosion-centric travesties that are called thrillers these days.

I also loved the clever way it uses AA. This organization is hopelessly square and an easy target for hipsters and the sardonic of temperament, but Dahl understands that behind it, it's a truly wonderful outfit that's saved hundreds of thousands of lives. So while at the beginning it invites us to laugh at all the poor ruined souls who gather to confess and hug and try to get through another lonely night (Luke Wilson is one of them), in the end it shows what a contribution is made by an outfit that lets people confess and hug and try and get through another lonely night.

You Kill Me (92 minutes, at Landmark's Bethesda Row) is rated R for violence and profanity.