Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”

USA. 2007. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Written by Kelly Masterson. Starring: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, Aleska Palladino, Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Bryan F. O’Bryrne, Blaine Horton, Arija Bareikis, Leonardo Cimino and Lee Wilkof.

Rating: ★★★½

Sidney Lumet’s latest film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a fascinating cross-pollination of the classical and the experimental. It toys around with chronology but does so in order to bring more attention to classical character motivations. The story takes the shape of a modern crime melodrama but transcends its characters into the realms of a Greek tragedy.

I hesitate to reveal too much about the film and it is certainly difficult to try to write about it without doing so. That is because the story’s twists and permutations are not based on criminal clockwork but on the feelings of the people involved. So I would suggest you shelve this review until after, although I will try to preserve the most crucial points if you continue.

The movie tells the story of two brothers, Andy (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) who both lead meager lives of desperation. Andy, the older one, hates his job as a real estate agent and feeds on a drug habit that eats his money away. Hank can’t afford to pay alimony to his ex-wife, Martha (Amy Ryan) or even his daughter’s school trip to the musical, The Lion King.

Andy, the more calculating and cunning one, comes up with a plan to execute a robbery of a jewelry store and tries to persuade Hank to do it, explaining it will be a monetary solution to their problems. Hank, the younger, needier one, is less than confident that he can pull it off. But Andy assures him that they will use no guns and that the store itself will be well-covered by insurance. Of course, the seemingly airtight plan does not precisely translate into action and everything goes badly wrong.

In most movies, that botched robbery alone would serve as the climax but Lumet’s film actually begins with it and then rewinds and sifts through different viewpoints to show what led each character to think the way they did. The innovatively constructed screenplay by first-time writer, Kelly Masterson splits into prolonged, isolated segments that separately follow the dreary lives of all characters in the timeline surrounding the pivotal event. Then the film gradually fast-forwards in these segments to show each one’s immediate drastic response to the crime. This strategy spares us from having to keep a scorecard of events (like last year’s Babel, which spun out too many disjointed stories to care about) and allows us to intently examine the personalities and intrigue behind each person, one at a time.

The connecting thread of intrigue lies in the familial connections that are put at stake. There is Andy and Hank, whose sibling rivalry of older and younger son expands into Biblical proportions of the tempter and the tempted. Their strenuous relationship shows that for every diabolical one with a plan, there is another indecisive one who is too weak to resist it. There is also Andy’s marriage to Gina (Marisa Tomei), which is passionate and sensual in Rio but gloomy and lifeless back home. Finally, there is the two brothers’ parents, Charles (Albert Finney), whose close involvement I will leave unrevealed.

The 83-year old Sidney Lumet is one of the longest working veteran directors around and this film shows that he has kept up with the times while never forgetting his roots. He serves his actors well here and draws intense, precise performances from his cast but what is most fascinating about him is his subtle camerawork. He knows when to push in and pull back his camera to display varying levels of claustrophobic tension (as he did in the classic, 12 Angry Men) and he shows that mastery here when he varies camera angles to shoot a single incident filtered through different characters’ perspectives.

As accomplished as the film is, it stops just short of being an all-out masterpiece with an ending that brings a little too much undue finality. I must tread carefully here but I will say that there is one particular element that I wish was more fleshed out than just talked about. And in a story where almost every single misdoing, no matter how stupid or cruel, feels like it contains at least a shred of vulnerability lurking beneath, the final blow somehow feels too steely and chilling.

The film’s title comes from a saying of an Irish toast, “May you be in heaven half an hour, before the devil knows you’re dead.” The implication of that phrase underscored the flawed thinking of Al Pacino’s Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon and underlines the thoughts of Andy and Hank in this film. They think that committing a perfect, victimless crime will be their highway to bliss. Of course, as Lumet commonly explores in his films, crimes are rarely perfect and never victimless and the wages of sin is death.