Sydney Lumet’s films often represent themselves as a zoo for the criminally mad, a zoo populated by caged and desperate men grappling with themselves and the law, usually losing to both; crime films as tragedies as pulp. As devoted as he is to the Genre, make no mistake, Lumet is a man of the melodrama. From Howard Beale’s enraged plea of desperation for us to get up from our chairs and to get mad, to Sonny’s anguished stand off in the name of love, his are films indulging in the consequences of human error from human despair, the inevitable tragedy of voluntary choice. Which brings us to Lumet’s newest offering, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”, a paradox of qualities that frustrate as much as it intrigues.
“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” lurks around in the shadows of a guilt ridden crime drama, insincere as much as it is crushing. Andy, played as cross between Jerry Lundengaard and Gordon Gekko by the always nifty Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is a man who “knows all the angles”, intelligent enough to recognize his desperation but too dim witted to maneuver around them. Andy’s brother, Hank, played annoyingly as ever by Ethan Hawke, is a worn down pair of jeans, heavy with tear and etched deeply with the burdens of his own impotence. The two brothers unlike in appearance but almost identical in distress hatch a plan to rob a jewelry store, a mom and pop outfit (HA! LITERALLY! HA!). This is a fool proof plan, until “it all falls apart”. There is death, there is guilt, there is anguish; this is where the film builds its walls, surrounding itself with the permutations of time, reflections of what Andy and Hank and the rest of their fucked up family must atone for.
This is exactly what makes “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” interesting; the dynamics of personal politics between the two brothers, their family and basically every other character in the film, especially Andy and his wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), an ennui stricken trophy wife, a sex pot teetering tentatively between come hither gestures and doe eyed innocence.
The film opens with Andy and Gina on vacation, fucking in a hotel room encased in mirrors. Their sex is bathed in an orange light, Andy’s body rotund and awkwardly confident, Gina, euphoric with passion. This isn’t sex, this is fucking, this is release, this is the 30 minute head start to heaven that one hopes for before the devil knows we’re dead (the original phrase that the film takes its title from). Lumet knows to understand Andy, we need to understand Gina, not as a character, but as an object of fantastic/fatalistic desire. As she dwarfs in and out from Andy’s body, the camera moves tentatively away only to be sucked back in by Tomei’s wrestling of the sheets; he plays to Tomei’s persona and body. We understand what makes Andy want to rob a jewelry store to take her to Rio de Janeiro, to escape to a fantasy where 30 minutes is time enough to escape the devil, but not sexually. Sex is the means for us to compare, to take the evidence of Andy as a pathetic figure from the word “fuck” and to see that Gina, although equally despicable, will be the best he will ever see and as such, he NEEDS her love, needs to hide it from the world and most probably himself. We need to see Andy’s fat ass, we can’t escape from it (literally). Lumet plays this scene and every other scene between the spouses with a certain calculation that he loses in other scenes. Witness the break down of Andy in the car. Gina sits next to him, helpless and barring on indifference. Lumet shoots it strictly as a parallel gesture, never allowing the frame to reveal a two shot sequence; it’s never shot-reverse shot. Although standard issue tactics, it nonetheless provides a glimpse into what Lumet wants, which is at least a modicum of technique that seems so absent from today’s craftless fare. But perhaps the most accentuated, concisely diluted scene in the film is the scene when Tomei leaves Andy behind, her listless body nestled into the corner of the screen, Andy walking through the shot, so indulgent in his guilt and desperation that he is completely oblivious to her presence. Lumet’s camera lingers with Tomei, holding back, as Hoffman goes in and out of the bathroom washing his face. There it is, there is where all the praise lavished on the film lies. The silence of departure, the hope for atonement. Lumet doesn’t push her into the corner, but lets her sit there tracking her without moving. Her presence eats away at the peripheral so ferociously that by the time she confesses to Andy her affair, we’re left with a sudden let down and regret that Lumet couldn’t finish the scene properly.
Of equal note is the relationship between Andy and Hank. They are interesting and deductive of a past relationship between the two brothers that need no exploration because the characters and their interactions are lived in and experienced by tonality and subjectivity. As Andy bullies his way through Hank, there is the scent of a dysfunctional history, one that has eroded over time, rusted itself into the core of each brother’s actions so much that gestures tell as much motive as expository dialogue; Andy gives his game away without speaking a word, only puffing on a cigarette.
And this is the paradox of the film. Lumet knows what is at stake, he knows what he’s gambling with and yet assumes we don’t. How else to explain the overly tedious and overly used trope of shuttling the film back and forth through time via urgent machine like sound effects and fast cuts, tracing linear lines from past to present, something forced and insincere, pushing context in our faces. Although satisfying and pertinent in the first 40 minutes, these intersections of time become a nuisance later on, when Lumet abandons his original motif of cutting in rhythm to character / emotional advancement, and begins to play the film straight, the shifts in time acting as insincere context builders for the story. For instance, the scene when Andy and Hanks father (Albert Finney) decide to take his dying wife off life support. Hunched over a table, Finney’s decaying body surrounded by his offspring, Lumet’s camera creeps in on Finney’s face. The shot ends on a close up of Finney, his face etched with wrinkles of time, sadness nothing new to a man of his age, and what should be a moment cradled by sincere stillness, Lumet decides to use as a segue, a place marker for the audience. This is a demarcation of the story, not of the morality, which is what Lumet seemingly first sought out to do. We know there is guilt, we know the gravity of the emotions and situation... we need not be reminded of any further context. In short, this is not grace. Like Murakami’s ball of yarn unwinding in the wind, the story, the characters, the emotions are all linear, and yet the film refuses to be. Lumet is so neurotic in his mapping of context, that he loses track of what he’s actually exploring and we end up diverging into material that forces us to witness the robbery and its subsequent (in)consequences over and over and over again like a merry go round of hell. This isn’t tantamount to 21 Grams, but nonetheless, it is still heedless in design. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” isn’t about a specific W of the big 5, but rather, it’s about all of them. It tries to play the genre, but in its neurotic mining of details pushes us so far away from the narrative that we simply can’t find our way back sometimes. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” leads itself in circles, quite literally, which might not be a terrible thing, because amassed from all this confusion are some gems of scenes.
In a way, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” works best as a cousin prologue to Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”, but Tarantino (My gosh.) eschewed the violence for the aftermath, which is something “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” attempts, but ends up faltering half way. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” is a concentrated scatter of details; it focuses on the things that don’t need to be focused on. It loses itself in the segues that are so resolutely manhandled by the musical interludes, musical interludes attempting to hide the stop and go haltering of the film. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” isn’t a terrible film. It’s one of Lumet’s better works, better than “Network”, but one gets the impression that under all of this is a better film, one that doesn’t need superfluous trappings to push the bleakness of human nature. Would I recommend it? Sure. But know that it might give you respite from the devil, but it won’t let you escape him.
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