Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
Furies Come to the Strip Mall
(Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 12/10/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
must be a sign of the strength of this year's crop of movies that this
column has fallen so far behind in covering the good ones. Sidney Lumet's
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which has been in town a
while, is a small gem that's easy to overlook in this season of rampaging
trolls and golden compasses. Fortunately, it isn't disappearing yet,
but moving this week from Cinemapolis over to Fall Creek Pictures.
Before the Devil Knows is
a minor movie with major themes. Mismatched brothers Andy (Philip Seymour
Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) are enduring lives of desperate penury—Andy
because of a hard drug habit, Hank due to underemployment and child-support.
Andy recruits his brother in a scheme to rob their father's (Albert
Finney) suburban jewelry store, envisioning the job as a quick, victimless
payday. ("May you may you be 40 years in heaven, before the devil
knows you're dead," runs an old Irish toast.) Naturally, the none-too-swift
Hank blows it, which leads to a couple of needless casualties. Hank
panics, driving Andy to take ever-more desperate measures to insulate
them both from blame.
Like a chess grandmaster trouncing
a novice, screenwriter Kelly Masterson herds these hapless pawns toward
an end they can't foresee, but they sense won't be pleasant. This sense
of causal inevitability makes this a family tragedy almost classical
in its intensity. There is no institutional authority enforcing justice
here, no hardboiled detective or genial cop with a nose for sniffing
out guilt. Instead, we get only the screeching sound of blood relatives
wrenched apart by the consequences of their own acts. It's the latest
incarnation of the oldest family drama in the world.
Lumet, whose triumphs have mostly
come in big-budget law and order stories with mega-stars (Serpico,
Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Prince of the City) transitions
with seeming ease to an indie film idiom with elaborate temporal shifts
a la Go or anything else Tarantino-esque. Visually, there still seems
to be something of the TV director in him—he'll never be called
a cinematic visionary. But it can't be said this old dog (Lumet is 83)
won't learn new tricks.
The cast is almost uniformly terrific.
Philip Seymour Hoffman begins his personal plunge into familial hell
with a knowing smirk pastered on his face, serenely confident in his
control over the puny beings around him. In this sense his performance
makes for an interesting comparison with that another egoistic manipulator
Hoffman portrayed in Capote. Ethan Hawke lends surprisingly strong
support as the somewhat dimwitted Hank, giving a generous performance
that will serve his celebrity only by making Lumet and Hoffman look
better. Albert Finney also has his moment as the family patriarch, whose
own surprising brutality explains much about where his sons came from.
There are quibbles. Accepting Hoffman
as Hawke's brother requires about as big a suspension of disbelief as
taking Arnold Schwarzenegger to be Danny DeVito's twin. The talented
Marisa Tomei—who looks nowhere close to her 43 calendrical years—is
sadly underutilized here as, basically, the trophy wife of a minor executive.
(When she pleads with Andy to trust her with more responsibility, one
imagines Tomei begging the same of Lumet and Masterson.) But who complains
about a few spotty drinking glasses at a feast this delicious?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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