Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/25/07
As we prepare for that most
soul-crushing of national spectacles, an election year, I get this sinking
feeling that we've all grown so good at parroting the lawyerly defenses
everyone on TV (be they politicians, athletes or celebrities) offers for
their Misdeed of the Week that we've begun to apply them to our own lives.
Right and wrong are out of favor, replaced by the Burden of Proof:
if I can construct a logical argument why anything I do is right, then
you have no right to criticize me for it. When our ethical discourse
consists almost entirely of random samplings of Dr. Phil and Crossfire,
you know we're in trouble. But it does create a great opening for
the likes of 83-year-old Sidney Lumet, who's been looking askance at our
national moral failings all the way back to 1957's 12 Angry Men,
to construct his best movie in over 30 years. Before the Devil
Knows You're Dead is a slick, ruthless thriller about two brothers
with no moral compass and bills to pay. As you might expect, a whole
lotta bad stuff follows while a brilliant filmmaker shows us he still knows
his way around.
Dressed in a ridiculous disguise,
Hank (Ethan Hawke) waits behind the wheel of a rented car as Bobby (Brian
F. O'Byrne) pulls on a mask and walks into a jewelry store. There,
he finds elderly Nanette (Rosemary Harris) behind the counter and begins
systematically robbing the place. But he doesn't see the gun the
owners have hidden in plain sight, and when she goes for it, he reaches
for his own, and they both end up dead. This, obviously, was not
how Hank and his brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) planned it, particularly
since Nanette was their mother. As they try to hide their guilt from
their father Charles (Albert Finney), one break after another goes against
them. Hank already owed money to his ex Martha (Amy Ryan, once again
brilliantly unpleasant), but now he's also got to answer to Bobby's wife
(Aleska Palladino) and her thug brother (Michael Shannon), not to mention
that car rental place that keeps happening upon clues he left behind in
the car. Andy's got problems of his own: he needed that money
to run off to Rio with his wife Gina (Marisa Tomei) before his employers
figure out how much money he's been skimming off the books. Their
bill is coming due: Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
Before the Devil Knows
You're Dead isn't as easy to pull off as it looks. None of its'
characters is truly likable (Nanette seems nice enough for the three minutes
or so that she survives), and most of them deserve what happens to them.
But because Hank and Andy's crime is so casually heinous, Lumet creates
great suspense out of watching the noose slowly tighten around their oh-so-deserving
necks. Debuting writer Kelly Masterson has created a solid mousetrap
of bad criminal planning and a smart structure within which to spring it:
the plot proceeds without us knowing much of anything about the characters
and gradually rewinds events from one point of view after another to allow
us to see exactly what actions have led them to where they're going.
Nothing, of course, is as simple as it seems at first, but no matter what
the characters tell themselves, none of what we learn excuses any of their
mistakes.
To make this kind of thing
work, you need great performances, and Lumet gets them from an excellent
cast. Hoffman perfectly embodies a certain kind of self-satisfied
corruption. While Andy is always quick with a justification for his
actions, Hoffman does a sensational job of showing the effort it takes
him to beat down his better nature and get on with the work at hand.
A scene where Charles apologizes to Andy for the way he raised him proceeds
a wonderful breakdown where the son pulls his car over and screams and
pounds his steering wheel against the fates, knowing he'd have never started
down this miserable road in the first place if he'd only heard those words
a few days earlier. Hawke has never been better as perhaps the most
gutless weasel ever committed to film. Hank is just worthless, and
when even his daughter calls him a loser we know she's just stating the
facts. He's too much of a coward not to go along with his brother's
scheme AND too much of a coward to carry it out himself. The last
time we see him, watch how he literally tosses money around as though doing
so changes any of what's happened. It would be very easy to allow
playing such a character to become an eye-rolling exercise in hammery,
but Hawke stays within himself no matter how shriekingly overwhelmed Hank
becomes. Finney is perfect as a man whose life completely falls apart
while he's away at the DMV. But one look at the sons he's raised
tells us he can't be as innocent as his position as a victim of their crime
makes him seem. And sure enough, when he gets a chance to do something
about it, he proves to be the best criminal in the bunch. Meanwhile,
Tomei does a great job of making her usual pluck pathetic.
If you find no other way
of knowing that Lumet's filmmaking prime was the 70's, you should suspect
it from the sheer volume of nudity and sexual content (the movie opens
with one of the most graphic sex scenes I've ever seen on film).
But you can also see it in the way the movie looks unflinchingly at the
moral decay of its' characters, whose drug habits, infidelity and white
collar crimes were just dry runs for murder. Masterson's script plays
like something Shakespeare might have written after seeing Pulp Fiction,
but The Bard would probably have found a way to do the one thing the movie
can't: give me a sense that what happens to anyone here is tragic,
rather than simple justice.
That is Before the Devil
Knows You're Dead's one limitation: its' only real rooting interest
is for Fate. But what it does, it does exceedingly well. And
it's nice to be reminded once in a while that even in the moral Bizarro
world in which we live, sometimes bad things happen to bad people too. |
