March 15: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

After watching Clooney’s The Ides of March, I decided to go back to Sidney Lumet, who I kept thinking of as I was watching the Clooney film.  Now I’m not sure how I made that connection.  Maybe because I went back to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and remembered Philip Seymour Hoffman in both.

That was about the only connection.  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterful film with great acting, pitch-perfect direction, a rich script and stakes.  Major stakes.  And heart.  It’s thriller about a heist, but it’s also a deep family-relationship film and a wide-cast character study.  This film is a wonderful cinema experience.

There’s a dark taint in the heart of the main character, Andy, though we only see the symptoms of the darkness for the first two-thirds of the film.  Andy manipulates his younger brother Hank, playing him like a puppet, and he patronizes a high-end drug dealer who provides him heroin and a place to use it, a Manhattan version of a Chinese opium den.  Andy also steals from his company, fails as a husband, and plans the robbery of his parents’ small jewelry store that triggers the downward spiral of the film.  And we come to realize that his relationship problems and fixer personality have roots in his past as the responsible older brother.  Before the Devil Knows has a deep, complex script that balances all these elements of this one character, and Hoffman delivers an intense portrait of the man who is holding all these pressures under control, barely managing to keep them in check, while the movie plot slowly intensifies the pressure from each one.  And as the pressure increases, we feel its intensification each time Hoffman inhales a deep breath or shifts his large frame awkwardly.  His is a great performance in an able script.

Andy’s younger brother, Hank, has almost as much complexity.  Played by Ethan Hawke, Hank is the failure of the family-- nervous, unreliable, weak and unable assume responsibility.  He has married a strong woman who’s divorced him, and even his daughter pushes him around.  Always seeking security, Hank is having an affair with Andy’s wife because she makes him feel good, and his fear of doing the jewelry store robbery leads him to count on Bobby, who bungles it.  The rich depth of the script here, too, even shows us how this the family history of Andy and Hank have led them to who they are in the film.  If older brother Andy’s calm but increasingly desperate attempts at fixing the situation create some of the tension here, the spoiled Hank’s frazzle as he copes with every new turn creates complementary stress.  The audience can only watch with bated breath as the stakes get ever higher for these two brothers who are still acting though their childhood roles.

I like Albert Finney as the father in this film, too, and I find his character adds even more depth to the portrait of the family and suspense to the story.  Lumet was already an old man himself when he directed this last film, and the detail to Finney shows the insight of an older director.  The settings that Finney works in, whether suburban dining room or Towncar, feel dead-on for an elderly man, and Lumet gives Finney the freedom to create Charles as a hurting, angry, inarticulate widower who feels like he might have been a failure as a father.  With his pants hiked up too high and his shirt tail tucked firmly in, Charles brings as much tension to the screen as his sons do, tension that continues to ramp up as the plot reveals more and more details of the taint within the family and the way it’s produced the evolving situation of the characters.

As Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead builds to a crescendo and past, you sit watching masterful performances masterfully woven into a thriller that’s also the psychological portrait of a family.  With so much skill, judgment and artistry at work, this is a mature film that sets a very high standard.