Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD      B+      

USA  (117 mi)  2007  d:  Sidney Lumet

May you be in heaven half an hour... before the devil knows you're dead

With a career that was spawned in Yiddish theater at the age of 4, working on Broadway both as an actor and director (productions listed here: Sidney Lumet), later finding work in television dramas, moving to feature films 50 years ago with the actor accentuated court drama 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), Lumet was married at one point to Lena Horne’s daughter and several years ago was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Academy Awards (2005), and up to the age of 83 continued to make terrific ensemble works that feature the breakdown of moral order as seen from the highly personalized vantage point of the individual. 

A grim film that only grows grimmer, featuring ominous music from Carter Burwell that has a haunting funeral dirge feel, yet it’s a deliciously made heist gone wrong movie that tells the story through various character flashbacks revealing the circumstances that led up to the scene of the crime.  Written by first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, using an overlapping time chronology, these sequence fragments are fraught with details and clues that connect the characters together in ways they don’t even know themselves, giving the audience unique insight into the unraveling events.  Something of a character study, events veer off the track from the opening nude scene where marital bliss turns sour, no explanation is offered, a dark omen that leads straight into the next sequence which is the heist itself, two back to back, in-your-face sequences that have an alarming level of intensity. 

Calmly and methodically, Lumet showcases the men who planned the heist, two brothers who couldn’t be more opposite, real estate banker Philip Seymour Hoffman whose drug-addicted pulse barely registers and Ethan Hawke, a squirmy, always over-anxious kind of guy who is behind in his child support payments and spends his time drowning his sorrows in a corner lounge.  Hoffman is so desperate for cash that he finds his mealy mouthed brother as just the right guy for the job, knocking off a tiny shopping mall jewelry store run by a lone, nearly blind, elderly employee.  Hawke balks at the offer, but he’s so desperate for cash that he soon changes his mind, leading to disastrous consequences.         

To ramp up the tension, Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei, but she’s sleeping with Hawke, a dangerous double-edged sword that only begins to describe the kind of troubled world we’re entering.  Through extremely deliberate direction, we’re smack dab in the middle of a family crisis where events are literally spiraling out of control, where the bonds between them were broken long ago, and this incident is only intensifying the severity of the rifts.  It’s hard to believe that the most likable character in the film is a barely alive, creepy looking jewelry fence with criminal ties who relishes his opportunity to gain revenge through his understanding of the seedy world around him:  “The world is an evil place.  Some people make money from it, and some are destroyed by it.”  With almost Shakespearean aplomb, Lumet leads his players to their inevitable fates, accentuating the sense of their isolated journeys along the way.