A Full-Throttle New York Joyride
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead / John Williams
Director Sidney Lumet has been making movies for an awfully long time. He was working behind the camera for television as early as 1948, and he was responsible for some of the most memorable movies of the 1970s, including Dog Day Afternoon and Network. He’s been working steadily through his later years, but since The Verdict in 1982, that work has been largely uninspired. Now, at 83, he’s proven it’s never too late for a comeback.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a hard-boiled, full-throttle New York joyride that revels in seamy characters, bad intentions, and sweaty palms. Think your family is dysfunctional? Well, let’s see. Are you having sex with your brother’s wife on a weekly basis? Are you and that same brother botching an armed robbery … of your own parents’ jewelry store? No? Then get in line, pal.
Meet the Hansons. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) are brothers who have much less in common than just their looks. Andy is an accountant pulling down six figures but still struggling to make ends meet due to profligacy, including a pricey drug habit and vacations to South America with his wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). In order to satisfy his needs, Andy is a bumbling schemer in the classical American mode, someone who David Mamet could have seamlessly added to the desperate cast of Glengarry Glen Ross. Andy’s cooking the books at work, but he’s hungry to bag bigger game. He’s bold enough to propose the robbery, figuring the insurance will take care of his parents and make it a victimless crime, but he’s not quite nervy enough to accompany Hank on the errand.
Hank — nervous, twitchy, and only willing to go through with the plan because he’s behind on child-support payments — enlists a bar buddy, Bobby (Brian F. O’Byrne) to help him. Aside from an abrupt, graphic opening sex scene between Andy and Gina (and not that it needs saying, but seeing both Hoffman and Tomei naked on a big screen creates an almost unsolvable visual dilemma), the robbery is the first thing we witness. It goes badly. The kind of badly involving a lot of blood.
After Hank frantically flees the scene, the movie takes the form of a series of extended flashbacks that lead up to, and past, the crime. Lumet may be getting on, but he handles the constantly fracturing timeframe more lucidly than the whippersnappers like Tarantino who have made the technique so ubiquitous.
Lumet’s strengths are further flattered by his cast. Hoffman is as good as ever. Great acting is in the details, and just the way Andy sighs as he bends toward a line of cocaine in his office is enough to make the performance award-worthy. Tomei is terrific and — there’s no way to avoid mentioning this — seductive on a nuclear level. It’s not just that Gina is frequently unclothed; Tomei portrays her as a creature who’s turned on by every passing air molecule, managing to writhe even while looking out a kitchen window at a wake.
As Hank, Hawke plays one of the few characters remotely deserving of sympathy, and I suppose in a different movie he would serve as some kind of moral anchor for the proceedings. But while this tale has shades of ancient tragedy, the script is seedy enough to keep earnestness at bay, and funny enough that pulpy entertainment always takes clear precedence over moral lessons. The movie is imbued with a certain kind of sadness — most poetically achieved when Andy visits a transvestite drug dealer in Trump Tower and stares down on midtown on a glum, gray day — but it also actively avoids being taken too seriously. Even the distinguished Albert Finney, who plays the Hanson patriarch, Charles, moves from grief-stricken victim to over-the-top vengeful monomaniac.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is the kind of entertainment that Hollywood should produce more often — human-scaled but fantastical, slick but not nihilistic. If it takes a veteran like Lumet to do it, may he live to 100.
John Williams lives in Brooklyn. He’s a freelance writer. He blogs at A Special Way of Being Afraid.
Rails & Ties | | Pajiba Love 10/29/07
Comments
"...Marissa Tomei"
Wow, now that's a name I haven't heard in a lonnnnng time...
Posted by: BarbadoSlim at October 29, 2007 2:37 PM
Yes! I'm glad this is good. Though I will see anything that PSH is in, ever.
Posted by: Kevin Longrie at October 29, 2007 2:46 PM
You know, my re-discovery of Mystery Men also brought the pleasant surprise of noticing PSH as one of the, "Disco Boys."
Posted by: BarbadoSlim at October 29, 2007 3:02 PM
Sigh! Despite this good review, I'll just sit back and wait for the inevitable Ethan Hawke hate to begin.
Posted by: PaddyDog at October 29, 2007 3:18 PM
Slim, are you sure you're not thinking of Eddie Izzard in Mystery Men?
Posted by: Anne (in Reno) at October 29, 2007 3:21 PM
I'm afraid I don't recall PSH in Mystery Men either.
Though a quick check on IMDB shows minor appearances by Doug Jones, Michael Bay and Dane Cook!
Posted by: Simon B at October 29, 2007 3:46 PM
so at no point does Marissa Tomei stomp her foot and say, "My biological clock is tickin' like this!"?
Too bad.
I'd like to see this, because I have enjoyed PSH in most everything he's done (even, gah, MI:III) and Marissa has a soft spot in my heart cuz My Cousin Vinny remains one of the few movies I can enjoy with my dad while he snortles himself to tears ... BUT I can't stand Ethan Hawke.
Posted by: Stella at October 29, 2007 4:07 PM
Marissa Tomei, purdy and trashy, alright! Ethan Hawke, scruffy but talented, tolerable. PSH (I cannot even write out his name) filthy and nothing more than a bag of acting tics.
I cannot abide him. He has ruined everything in which I have ever seen him, every movie, every stage play, even getting drunk with buds in a bar in New York.
I want to see this movie but I cannot spend any more time in the dark with PSH. Every pore in his body screams WATCH ME ACT. I refuse to do so ever again.
Posted by: rudy at October 29, 2007 5:27 PM
Oy, confusing Izzard for Hoffman on Mystery Men.
That's DEFINITELY, a paddlin'
Posted by: BarbadoSlim at October 29, 2007 5:36 PM
"He's been working steadily through his later years, but since The Verdict in 1982, that work has been largely uninspired."
What do you mean "since" The Verdict? Don't you mean after The Verdict? Because that film was the last really great Lumet picture. It starred Paul Newman as a low-life lawyer who gets a chance at redemption with an important medical malpractice case. The whole side story arc with Charlotte Rampling is ultimately heartbreaking -- for both of them. I mean this is the flick that should have won Newman his first Oscar, not that poolshark twaddle with Tomasita Cruise.
Posted by: matt at October 29, 2007 7:20 PM
I will definitely be seeing this, as I have a big 'ol crush on PSH. Yeah, I said it. Dude may be pasty and chubby, but he's also really freakin' hot.
Posted by: Tori at October 29, 2007 9:05 PM
In The Big Lebowski, PSH stole every scene he was in (which is really saying something because man that is a great movie!) and I've adored him ever since.
Posted by: Loob at October 29, 2007 9:32 PM
I hear ya, Tori, on the PSH crush. It must be those squinty eyes and the smart alec smirk. He just seems like he would be a really great guy to grab a coffee with. I could just imagine having a deep conversation with him. He would squint into my eyes as I rail against the crappy state of most movies these days, and would smirk at my ironic observations. Sigh!
Posted by: AllGussiedUp at October 30, 2007 9:31 AM
YIKES! Until I read these comments crushing on the detestable PSH I really did not believe my assistant's old saw that "Ain't a pot so crooked ya can't find a lid that fits." Really Pajib[i]ans? PSH comes "pre-lubed" as we used to say in the day. His "acting" consists of sweating and looking greasy. Who cannot do a better imitation of Truman Capote? Hell, 77% of lesbians could do a more convincing portrayal.
He makes me resort to my old saw that, "It don't get that dark; I don't get that lonely." Oh well, to each her own said the farmer kissing the cow. See! See what he does to me--resorting to cliches as a shield against his yuckiness.
Posted by: rudy at October 30, 2007 12:19 PM
Rudy, you are woefully incorrect in your assessment of the great and powerful PSH. He is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Save your hate for the celbutards. Or, just don't watch his movies. Problem solved.
Posted by: Ahh... at October 30, 2007 1:32 PM
I think he's more like chunky peanut butter, which I also do not like.
Posted by: rudy at October 30, 2007 2:44 PM
Chunky peanut butter is my favorite! Spread it on Ahh...'s sliced bread. The man is smokin'.
Posted by: AllGussiedUp at October 30, 2007 4:43 PM
Yes, Marisa Tomei! Just seeing her name in print makes me giggle.
It's all George Costanza's fault. Imagine the nerves of that guy, asking Marisa out just hours after his fiancée was poisoned to death by cheap wedding invitaion envelope glue.
Posted by: piedlourde at October 31, 2007 6:22 PM
I finally got around to seeing this shitball.
It bored the living fuck out of me.
Posted by: Spork at April 19, 2008 10:48 PM