Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" (2007)

Directed by Sidney Lumet

A dysfunctional family. Betrayals. Ugly arguments. All of these unsavory aspects are present and in full force in Sidney Lumet's new film. Two brothers, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank Hanson (Ethan Hawke), are both in desperate need of money. Andy is a middle manager at a corporation who has an expensive drug habit while the more pathetic Hank, who has recently endured an ugly divorce, spends a lot of money on spoiling his daughter at a private school and drinking at bars.

Andy proposes to have them both rob their own parents' diamond store in a suburban shopping mall - they would suddenly have half a million dollars while their parents' insurance would take care of the rest. Most of all, no one would suspect that the owners' own sons would commit such a robbery. But, as happens in most films like this, the robbery goes wrong and their mother - played by Rosemary Harris of the "Spiderman" trilogy - is murdered.

The two sons are forced to live with the guilt of killing their own mother, as well as still having to deal with their financial problems and the possibility of their complicity in the robbery being discovered. Lumet primarily uses a realist style, in which his edits are mostly seamless and his shots rarely beautiful - his film is a harsh and unflinching examination of how these people behave when they are pushed to their limits. Hoffman plays his character like a volcano that is on the verge of erupting; his middle-aged businessman displays a veneer of calm that, on occasion, turns scarily violent. It is a marvelous performance that would be hard to compete with, yet Hawke manages to be an effective opposite as the wimpy and less intelligent brother.

Despite the intriguing plot and characters, the film has its flaws. One aspect of the film involves Andy's estranged relationship with his father (a dignified Albert Finney), but this is never developed to a satisfactory extent, which is disappointing since a narrative where the father begins to suspect Andy's involvement in the robbery has to rely on the two characters' distrust of one another in order to be effective.

Lumet's decision to split the film up into disjointed narratives that are not presented in chronological order ultimately takes away from the film's power. He is a realist filmmaker who, I think, attempted to present all of the characters' actions at a certain moment uninterrupted. This does not work, though, because his transitions, which feature loud sounds and flashing images overlapped from the next scene, are distracting and feel out of place with the style of the rest of the film. These transitions and the needless switching between narratives take us out of our involvement with these characters, reminding us that this is all, despite the incredible emotional intensity, just a movie.

Rating: 8