Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
★★★★☆
Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Written by: Kelly Masterson
Let’s start off with the two fairly minor things that didn’t work very well for me in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. The first is the unnecessary POV-shifting, scene-revisiting, flash-back-and-forth construction of the film’s narrative. When a film like Pulp Fiction, which had lots of characters who all had individual arcs and criss-crossing story lines, fiddles with chronology, it makes sense because the narrative isn’t particularly linear or, more to the point, it isn’t as effective if told linearly. But in Before The Devil, there’s no point at which you can say, “If we already knew what was going on behind the scenes here, this would be less effective,” or “If we hadn’t gotten the other characters’ perspective on the scene with the current point of view character, we wouldn’t have as much empathy for what is happening.” The result then, is a gimmick. And there’s no need for a gimmick in a movie as riveting and powerful as this.
The second thing that didn’t work is Ethan Hawke. No disrespect to the actor, who does what he can, but I read that his character, Hank, was originally supposed to be a 19 year-old and was cast older to make him seem more tragic. Except it doesn’t make him seem more tragic, it makes him seem more unbelievable. Part of it is that the script, intending for Hank to be youthful, doesn’t ever have a chance to deal with the circumstances that might make a nearly forty year-old man into such a sniveling, un-worldly pantywaist. We’re just supposed to accept that Hank is this way but Hawke has too much soul in his eyes and too much natural presence in the world to sell the level of incapability he’s supposed to. Perhaps it was bad casting, perhaps Lumet just needed to leave the original script alone more, it’s hard to say.
But beyond this, we’re treated to a slow-motion train wreck of self-implosion and a study on causality that is gripping and delirious. The film follows Andy (played with an almost frightening amount of emotional range by the brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman), an exec with demons to spare who comes up with a plan to help himself, his weak-willed brother Hank and his drifting/distant wife, Gina (played for the first half of the movie by Marisa Tomei’s breasts, then for the second half by Marisa Tomei’s bitten bottom lip). He concocts a victimless, nonviolent robbery of their parent’s jewelry store and tasks Hank with executing the plan. Through a series of sloppy preparations and sheer misfortune, the robbery goes bad and the impact of Andy’s plan sends shockwaves through their extended family. As things careen wildly out of control, the movie flips back and forth between Hank, Andy and their father Charles (played with mush-mouthed ardency by Albert Finney), showcasing the top down collapse of all three.
It’s a crime film that is more about family than glorifying lawlessness. It’s a movie that is, more than anything else, about the cost of decisions people make. These are not hardened criminals, they are desperate people who don’t seem to understand Newton’s Laws apply to human behavior as well as the natural world. It’s a family drama that plays out on a whole different scale than something more subtle, like perhaps Rachel Getting Married. Not that the two films are thematically alike at all, but the dissection of darker family secrets runs a connective thread between them and similar films, but where emotive dramas culminate in characters that rise above or grow beyond or simply take their leave, Before The Devil climaxes with the most complete depiction of a man pushed over the edge as I can recall seeing. Hoffman owns the last fifteen minutes of this movie, if he doesn’t own the entirety of it.
This is worth watching for his performance alone, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. I do wish they had made a couple of better decisions on the directorial end, but I can’t help but recommend watching, especially if you need to remind yourself that no matter how insane your family may be, it always could be worse.