Released:
October 12, 2007 (New York Film Festival)Director: Sidney Lumet
*****
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is like the ball of yarn a cat plays with. As long as both ends are tucked in and not pulled, the ball of yarn remains relatively intact. But pull a stray piece and, soon afterward, the entire thing becomes undone. Such is the case here. When brothers Hank and Andy (Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman) decide to knock over their parents jewelry store because both are in desperate need of money, they call it a victimless crime. The robbery goes horribly wrong, resulting in the fragile lives the family has created to come shattering apart, making each person do things they wouldn't normally do.
With lesser actors, director Sidney Lumet's latest outing would have rung hollow, as if the script was imposing a set of character traits on a group of actors unable to inhabit the parts. Without muttering a line of dialogue, though, we know each of the people on screen, if only in the broad sense. Hawke, as Hank, with his moppy, unkempt hair is a man at the end of his rope while brother Andy carries himself with dignity and class, despite being in well over his head as well. Then there's Andy's wife Gina (Marisa Tomei). We know her, too. She is upper class, with Andy only for the money and not real love. It is these people, and to a lesser extent Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris as the parents, we want to shake, rattle and stir. In the great pantheon of bad movie ideas, robbing your own parents store is near the top of the list.
What the film doesn't tell us-at least not all at once-is why they do it. Instead of being a simple whodunit story, the script throws that question out of the window at the outset. We know who it is. But why? That's the great mystery. And once those answers come, in the form of segments devoted to each character leading up to and after the robbery, they are whole people. Not terribly brilliant people, but complete. Even at this point the film doesn't fade to black, allowing us to ruminate on what they have done. We are forced to follow them to their ultimate destruction. Remember that yarn? It is pulled to such lengths there is no ball anymore, just a mess of tangles and waste.
Lumet gets perhaps the best work out of Hawke since Dead Poet's Society, as he is continually forced to carry the emotional burden of the film. Perhaps a bit overreaching in some scenes, he isn't strictly a bad person, just caught up in events he can't do anything about, trying to be everything to everybody. Hoffman is more restrained, lashing out only at the end. Tomei is wonderfully understated, knowing full well hers is a supporting part and not where the camera is going to be focused for any prolonged period of time. A minor gripe: the slam cuts which shift the perspective of the film come on suddenly, just as we're becoming comfortable with what we're seeing. Maybe that's the point, though. To make sure we're not comfortable watching a group of people dig their own graves.
