BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Sidney Lumet, 2007 

 

PITCH: Old director goes Pulp Fiction.

 

STORY: A robbery is planned by one brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who enlists the aid of another, Hank (Ethan Hawke). The dead body on the sidewalk afterwards belongs to a small-time hood Hank recruited for the dirty work and the saleswoman bleeding on the floor is the brother’s mother and the owner, with their father Albert Finney, of the store they decided to hold up. And that’s only act one.

 

HOOK: Greed, envy, stupidity, corruption, ambition, sex, drugs and hate—and who doesn’t love those in a family flick—lead to murder. 

 

JOHN: In his book, Making Movies, the 83 year-old director said, “Let the material tell you what it’s about, but the material had better be good.” Well in the case of this film, the material, the actors and the directing are superb. It begins with a segment before the heist and the botched jewelry store heist itself that almost seem as if we are watching them from the perspective of different security cameras. Instead it is showing us the points of view of the two brothers. What I loved about the movie is that anyone else in Hollywood would have been satisfied with that as the plot, but for Lumet this is a jumping off into the dynamics of a dysfunctional family on the road to physical, spiritual and moral destruction. To me, we’re in Arthur Miller country, and the performances ratchet up too—from the sniveling Ethan Hawke, to the wily Philip Seymour Hoffman, and climaxing with heavy-handed justice of a growling, overwrought Albert Finney. 

 

 GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

 

SPANKY: This is exhausting; I’ll give you that. And people are evil. However, those ever-rising plateaus take a dip at the end. Lumet has led us to expect more and more with each part of this film, but he ends it with a nihilism that’s been there all along. There is no catharsis of Greek tragedy here, no matter how much posturing. My guess is that Lumet knows he’s going to die, and thinks its better to leave a world of shit than one in which we can obtain some kind of redemption. PS Am I the only one not sleeping with Marisa Tomei?   

 

“ONE PAW UP” (2 BARKs out of four) 

 

KEEPER: “It’s too late to think.”