By Marc S. Sanders
When it comes to crime – New York crime – few directors come as close as Sidney Lumet to make an audience feel the authenticity of its trappings. Maybe only Martin Scorsese can stand next to Lumet. Either with crime on the streets (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) or within the courtrooms (Find Me Guilty, 12 Angry Men), or both (Night Falls On Manhattan), Sidney Lumet hones directly upon how the plans should operate and when everything should unfold or derail.
With the last picture before his death, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead zeroes in on crime within an educated Irish family nucleus. Andrew (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) has it laid out perfectly for his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to commit the perfect robbery. No one will get hurt and the insurance company will cover any loss. The approximate take is around six hundred thousand. These guys carry their own desperate reasons for even considering such an idea, but Andy knows nothing can go wrong. Hank has some trepidation though, because the target is mom and dad’s jewelry store.
Kelly Masterson’s script shows how quickly everything comes undone with bloodshed and unaccounted for details that could lead straight back to the two brothers. It’s all told through three different perspectives – Andy, Hank and their father Charles played by Albert Finney. Often, Lumet will return to the very same scene you saw moments earlier to show two sides of a phone call or in what direction one character goes versus that of another following a particular action that has occurred. The timeline even jumps back in time a few days to show the direct perspective of any of these three particular characters ahead of showpiece scene – the robbery. Charles was retaking his driver’s license test. Elsewhere, Hank was struggling to pay spousal and child support with an angry ex-wife (Amy Ryan). Andrew was scheming and committing other clandestine acts both at work and in his free time.
However, Masterson’s script weaves all of these side details into how much more complicated this botched robbery becomes in the aftermath. All of what they commit following the robbery compounds into potentially making it worse for everyone involved.
Some of the breadcrumbs don’t carry enough water at times though. You might have to tolerate the characters being more intuitive than they likely should be. Andrew leaves a business card with a side character. When the film circles back to this item, it seems a little too easy for someone else to get wise about what has transpired. I just chose to go with it.
Marisa Tomei is also part of the cast, caught in a love triangle as Andy’s wife and Hank’s mistress. Tomei is really good, lending some authenticity with unscrupulous nudity in scenes with both Hoffman and Hawke. This storyline serves as character exposition and only briefly scrapes against the crime drama at play. It could have been excised from the film, but because the dialogue and scenario is written and performed so well, it effectively held my attention.
Albert Finney is magnificent as the patriarch owner of the store. Simply his devastated, echoey breathing and the way he fumbles to put his eyeglasses on to learn more about what has occurred is absolutely genuine. A late middle-aged man discovering horrible truths. Finney plays it beautifully. That being said, I wish the film offered more backstory to his character. There are few hints suggesting how he regarded Andy as the first born who needed be thrown to the wolves and learn to fend for himself. Contrarily, Hank is the younger and more disappointing son. Yet, the script is short on material that further explores the relationship between the father and his sons. I felt the film demanded more because Charles is quite significant to the conclusion of the story, which carries an unexpectedly abrupt ending.
The acting and assembly of time and perspective are so finely tuned by the whole cast under Lumet’s direction. Still, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead needed another twenty to thirty minutes of storytelling. One character runs out of frame with an unfinished storyline. Another, seems too hasty in making a final decision with an easy convenience.
Don’t get me wrong. I strongly recommend this last effort from Sidney Lumet. It’s a unique crime yarn with an especially conniving Phillip Seymour Hoffman doing some of his best work. The set up had me riveted and I couldn’t wait to see how all these terrible scenarios were going to fix themselves or make things horribly worse.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 