As Michael, a thief awaiting execution by two assassins in "Violet & Daisy," Gandolfini adds another indelible portrait to his ever-growing collection. He's marked for death for daring to steal from a criminal kingpin, but he lives longer than he should simply by being so unpredictable, so odd and sweet. In one scene, the assassins burst into a room where they expect Michael to be seated in a chair and unload dozens of rounds at him, only to discover that he's moved; when he appears in another part of the room, he's holding a tray of freshly-baked cookies, and offers some to the would-be killers. Gandolfini's face is so warm and genuine, yet so mysteriously unsettling, that this seems like plausible behavior.
Gandolfini's quietly magnificent performance is the only reason to see "Violet & Daisy," a thriller that might as well have been released in 1996, when everybody and their brother and their sister and their cousin twice-removed was trying to be Quentin Tarantino, writing screenplays about loquacious hit men and gangsters and molls delivering cutesy monologues in wacky, not-quite-real universes. The aforementioned assassins, Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan), are young, beautiful women whose blank-faced sweetness is a cover for their incredible and seemingly soulless violence.
They live in one of those movie worlds that seems to contain underworld types and nothing else, one filled with signifiers and tropes and cliches borrowed from whatever films, TV shows and modern art movements the filmmaker enjoyed. They share a lovely little apartment that's art-directed, like every other set in the film, to look like the showroom of a vintage furniture and knicknacks emporium. They behave as if they're two little girls taking part in an endless slumber party, one that just happens to include violent hits carried out with silenced pistols, often with disguises employed. In an early sequence, Violet and Daisy pose as nuns delivering "Righteous Pizza" (the film apparently left out the scene where they create the convincingly monogrammed boxes) then engage in an elaborate, bloody gunbattle with thugs in an apartment building lobby, unloading round after pinpoint-accurate round. In their down time, they bounce on beds and look at fashion magazines and fantasize about saving enough money to buy pretty dresses they've had their eyes on. They ride to hits on tricycles. The previously-mentioned cookie scene only works because Violet and Daisy decided to close their eyes before leaping into the room and firing at their target -- another acknowledgement that they're overgrown girls, or emotionally arrested young woman, and that this is all a big game to them, no matter how hardboiled Violet acts. It's that kind of movie -- Tarantino by way of "Juno" or "Son of Rambow", childlike yet knowing, packed with bright, jumbled production design and mournful atmosphere, and sadly lacking soul.
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