Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007, USA)

I wanted to like Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, what with its great cast, intriguing premise, and near-legendary director. But I ended up feeling that the film was less than the sum of its parts, somewhat ironically echoing a sentiment one of the main characters voices about himself.

Before the Devil is Sidney Lumet's latest film, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers in dire emotional and financial straits. Andy (Hoffman) suggests to Hank (Hawke) that all of their problems (which are great in number - troublesome wives and ex-wives, creative accounting, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc.) could be solved through thievery, specifically by robbing the small suburban jewelry store owned by their parents (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney). Naturally, everything goes very, very wrong very, very fast, and both brothers find themselves spinning further out of control in the wake of a botched heist.

The narrative is told in boomerang style - Lumet presents one character's experience of a piece of the story - Hank before the robbery, Andy before the robbery, Charles (Finney) after the robbery - but does so with such distracting, out-of-style transitions that the whole device feels cheap. Better to have dispensed with the post-production effects and have gone with a simple fade to black, as it's not really the narrative style that's the problem here.

So what exactly is the problem? The film is filled with very good performances - Hoffman, as usual, can do no wrong, and Hawke does a nice job of using his pretty-boy looks to suggest a man who never made good on his early promise. Finney is great, as is Marisa Tomei as Andy's flighty wife. There is great texture and feeling to individual scenes within these character's arcs, but the whole thing doesn't hang together quite as it should, partly because it's uncertain what the story is really about. Does Andy act so horribly because daddy never really loved him? Really? Is Hank an immature, whiny loser because he's the baby of the family? If the filmmakers were really trying to sell these little family dramas, perhaps a heist film wasn't the vehicle of choice.


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