Movie Review: ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’

Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” is such a superb crime melodrama that I almost want to leave it at that. To just stop writing right now and advise you to go out and see it as soon as you can. I so much want to avoid revealing plot points that I don’t even want to risk my usual strategy of oblique hints. You deserve to walk into this one cold.

Yet that would prevent my praise, and there is so much to praise about this film. Let me try to word this carefully. The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers — yes, brothers, because although they may not look related, they always feel as if they share a long and fraught history. Hoffman plays Andy, a payroll executive who dresses well and always has every hair slicked into place, but has a bad drug habit and an urgent need to raise some cash. Hawke plays Hank, much lower on the financial totem pole, with his own reasons for needing money; he can’t face his little girl and admit he can’t afford to pay for her class outing to attend “The Lion King.” Hank looks more like the druggie, but you never can tell.

Andy suggests they solve their problems by robbing a jewelry store. And not just any jewelry store, but find out for yourself. He has it all mapped out as a victimless crime: They won’t use guns, they’ll hit early Saturday when the shopping mall doesn’t have customers, the store’s losses will be covered by insurance, and so on. Sounds good on paper, before everything goes wrong. And that’s when the movie becomes intense and emotionally devastating.

These two brothers are capable of feeling emotions rare in modern crime films: grief and remorse. They cave in with regret. And they still need money; Andy learns that when you are heartbroken it is bad enough, but even worse when your legs may be broken, too. Meanwhile, their dozy father (Albert Finney) starts looking into the case himself, and that leads to a conversation with one son that Eugene O’Neill couldn’t have written any better.

The movie fully establishes the families involved. Finney has been married forever to Rosemary Harris, and still loves her to pieces. Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei, who just keeps on getting sexier as she grows older so very slowly. Hawke is divorced from Amy Ryan, who would happily see him in jail for non-payment of child support. Although the film opens with Hoffman and Tomei ecstatically making love in Rio (say what you will about the big guy, Hoffman looks to be an energetic and capable lover), their marriage is far from perfect.

The Japanese name some of their artists Living Treasures. Sidney Lumet is one of ours. He has made more great pictures than most directors have made pictures, and found time to make some clunkers on the side. Here he takes a story that is, after all, pretty straightforward, and tells it in an ingenious style we might call narrative interruptus. The brilliant debut screenplay by Kelly Masterson takes us up to a certain point, then flashes back to before that point, then catches us up again, then doubles back, so that it meticulously reconstructs how spectacularly and inevitably this perfect crime went wrong.

And it doesn’t simply go wrong, it goes wrong with an aftermath we care about. This isn’t a movie where the crime is only a plot, and dead bodies are only plot devices. Its story has deeply emotional consequences. That’s why an actor with Albert Finney’s depth is needed for an apparently supporting role. If he isn’t there when he’s needed, the whole film loses. As for Hoffman and Hawke, so seemingly different but such intelligent actors, they pull off that miracle that makes us stop thinking of anything we know about them, and start thinking only of Andy and Hank.

This is a movie, I promise you, that grabs you and won’t let you think of anything else. It’s wonderful when a director like Lumet wins a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at 80, and three years later makes one of his greatest achievements.

In the ’70s, when Sidney Lumet directed Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, and later on through The Verdict and Q&A, you could love his films and still feel that he was an electrifying utilitarian-craftsman more than an artist. His tightly wired dramas of crime, honor, and corruption were rooted in the turmoil of the New York streets, and they caught the big desperation of little men, but there was nothing in them comparable to, say, the red-hot candied camera of Scorsese, the wizardry of Altman. Lumet’s films took place under a fluorescent glare, in cruddy police offices and sterile boardrooms; his style was as plain as the talk at a midtown lunch counter, as direct yet haphazard as a misfired gunshot. He would plant the camera in a room and let his actors simmer and explode — the quintessence of brute-force ’70s realism. Lumet made teeming, energized, powerful movies, but he made them with prose rather than poetry.

Except that now, in the context of the glitzy, ADD-edited, steroidally pumped spirit of the modern megaplex thriller, that no-frills Lumet style, revived — triumphantly — in his mesmerizing new crime drama, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, looks like poetry after all. Lumet is now 83, but in Before the Devil he works with the vigor and cunning and wide-awake elegance of a virtuoso half his age. Those unbroken, slow-burn takes are really so much more than functional; Lumet’s camera has become an invisible cage, inviting us to study the behavior of the human animals trapped inside. In the opening, Philip Seymour Hoffman, staring at a hotel mirror, has sex with Marisa Tomei, and if the image is lurid and a bit creepy (how did this Pillsbury Doughguy land that hottie?), their pillow talk creates a noirish afterglow of avarice, fleeting affection, and fear.

The film then cuts to ”The Day of the Robbery,” at which point we see, played out in high-tension actual time, the holdup of a jewelry store in a suburban shopping mall. It’s a crime so low-rent, and one that goes so spectacularly wrong, that this might be a Dog Day Afternoon that takes place, if possible, even further down the scale of criminal ineptitude. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead leaps around in time, structuring itself like one of those ”flashy” post-Tarantino mind-benders, yet as the suspense strays from dank yuppie bars to a rent-a-car office to the swank designer lair of a super-upscale heroin dealer, what happens is so vivid and suck-in-your-breath real that none of it can be written off as a pop fantasy. The chronology isn’t just fractured; it’s ingeniously layered, as the script, by Kelly Masterson, keeps rotating back to situations we only thought we knew. We never feel we’re watching ”criminals” so much as banal ordinary men who have sunk to the level of acting like criminals. Which is so much scarier, because they could be us.

It’s Hoffman’s Andy who hatches the heist. He’s the payroll manager at a tony Manhattan real estate office, but he’s mired in debt, drugs, and a faltering sense of manhood (Tomei is the trophy wife he’s scrambling to live up to), so when he taunts his brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke), into going in on a plan that will pay off for both of them, he’s the voice of temptation. Hoffman, oozing scabrous charm, finds a gruesome strength in his character’s weakness. Andy is a louse, but he knows how to play people, especially the little brother he still regards as a baby. Hank, who works at the same office, is dissolute and divorced, with child-support payments he can’t keep up with. Which is why he goes for Andy’s scheme: to rip off their parents’ jewelry store. It’s a ”victimless” crime the insurance will cover, and that will net 60 grand for each of them, but it’s also an act of blasphemy. Before the Devil is a zeitgeist movie, rooted in the new middle-class money hunger.

I’m not going to give away any more, because this is a movie you want to discover. You want to savor its bad behavior, its crime that blows up in everyone’s face — and, most potently, its tale of a family crashing on the rocks of its destiny. Hoffman has become a cathartic actor, who taps his darkest sides without protection, as if to say: Admit it, you all know this pain too. Late in the movie, he has the quietest trashing-the-room tantrum I’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the most memorable. He and Hawke, who makes Hank a jumble of duplicity and childlike trust, give seismic performances, and so does Albert Finney as the dad who towers over both of them. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead may be the only movie I’ve seen that earns comparison to both a great film noir and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s proof that Sidney Lumet’s talent is, in every sense, timeless.