New York Film Festival 2007

[Chris Knipp]

SIDNEY LUMET: BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (2007)


PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, ETHAN HAWKE

Like a train wreck

This movie directed by the 83-year-old Lumet brings to mind Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Depending on how you look at it, Tarantino is the master, or the infamous originator, of the scrambled time-line. That film begins after a disastrous failed jewelry store robbery and follows, with overlapping chronologies, the subsequent behavior of various participants who wind up in a warehouse. The title of this new botched jewelry store heist picture comes from an Irish toast: May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. According to Lumet at the NYFF press screening, the screenplay came in over the transom from one Kelly Masterson. Lumet wasn't sure, at the Q&A, if Masterson was a man or a woman, so they don't seem to be close. Lumet did the rewriting. This included making the primary characters behind the robbery not just friends but brothers. This is an important touch, since this is, or became, a story of total family meltdown—one whose intensity and fatality is such that links with Greek tragedy have been mentioned.

Things are not going very well for either older brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) or baby brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Andy is embezzling his company to pay for his expensive drug habit. Things aren't clicking between him and his wife Gina (Marisa Tomei)—and unbeknownst to him she's sleeping with Hank. Hank, who's not doing well financially and is behind in his child-support, is a lovable loser—which makes you wonder why Andy should talk him into carrying out a robbery. He seems incapable of so much as delivering a pizza. What Andy doesn't own up to at first is that the place to be robbed is their own parents' "mom and pop" strip mall jewelry store. Hank knows he can't do a robbery himself. He secretly enlists a seedy character he knows named Bobby (Brian F. O'Byrne) to enter the store while he waits in a rental car.

Bobby's a tough guy all right, but hey, none of these boys is the sharpest knife in the drawer, and Bobby makes a hash of it, and in the process of getting himself killed shoots Hank and Andy's own mother (Rosemary Harris), who just happens to be minding the shop that day because an employee couldn't make it.

Reservoir Dogs skips the actual robbery scene. It's reconstructed in subsequent dialogue. Masterson/Lumet's screenplay includes the scene of the robbery, then goes back and forth over the four days prior to it and the week following it in chronologically scrambled segments. These are a problem. Lumet had to add labels giving date and point of view for these out-of-sequence segments, because he himself couldn't follow where they were meant to fit on the first reading. What you can't tell on viewing the film is why these sequences need to be so scrambled other than to conceal, for a while anyway, how dumb this robbery scheme is. What they clearly show is what a lot of trouble the brothers are in, before they make things much worse.

Lumet knew this plot-based movie would need great acting to put across the characters and screw the emotions up to a fever itch. He began with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was given choice of which brother to play. Hawke was called in: and he gives a surprisingly strong performance as a weak man. Albert Finney as Charles, the father, naturally maintains the intensity level. And Tomei fits. The cops aren't helpful, so Charles decides to find out on his own who staged this robbery, and he seems to know where to look. Bobby had a kid, and the brother of the kid's mother, Dex (Michael Shannon), who's no more fun to be with than Bobby, comes looking for Hank, and finds him.

Before the Devil excels in its powerful evocation of total meltdown. It reads as something that goes too slow at first, than rushes too much at the end. Lumet, who's astonishingly vigorous at 83 and is said to work incredibly fast still, calls this story "melodrama," and thus defines it as working by certain rules, among them the suspension of disbelief where a lot of stuff happens with shocking speed. Arguably too much happens and though by intention not everything is explained about how the characters end up, the ending provides not the catharsis of Greek tragedy but the sensation of having witnessed a train wreck. The element of Tarantino that you most miss is the good dialogue. But you also miss the well placed dramatic pause.