Sidney Lumet's BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD

[oscar jubis]

Sidney Lumet was perhaps invigorated and inspired by the Lifetime Achievement Oscar he received in 2005. Last year's Find Me Guilty and his new crime drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead are Lumet's best back-to-back releases since the early 80s (Prince of the City and The Verdict).

One of the chief pleasures of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is to observe the heavily-plotted and surprising narrative unfold. Lumet's storytelling is so precise, and the less you know about the story beforehand the better. You won't read anything here that could remotely spoil your enjoyment. It's sufficient to say that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens with a failed robbery and that the film flashes back and then forward with complete clarity (thanks to intertitles that reveal who is the protagonist of each chapter and its time orientation relative to the robbery). The film chieves the intensity of Greek tragedy and contains Freudian subtext that gives it heft. Lumet is famous for his expert direction of actors and this film supports that, as Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman have never been better. Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a juicy, satisfying, movie-movie for grownups.

[tabuno]

I'm really becoming cynical towards the end of the year. Alas, my sour outlook has gotten its claws into this movie too.

I wasn't really impressed, in fact, I was annoyed by the flashbacks and the resultant chaos. The flashback only served and not to the best effect to reveal a major twist in the movie that occurs half-way through the movie. I sort of saw it coming anyway. The problem with this movie is it's overly too cute for itself. Simplicity and a good storytelling is my favorite cinematic device unless one has a really, really good reason and Sidney Lumet's reason for flashbacks wasn't good enough for me. Instead for all the wasted time he devoted to going back and forth, could have been better spent developing more of the story and the relationships between the characters. I would have really appreciated more time spent of the husband and wife owners of the jewelry shop and experienced their bonding and love for each other, this is crucial particularly when it comes to the end of the movie.

There are some amazing scenes in this movie, especially with Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance and near breakdown in the car with his wife - that's an Oscar winning scene. I would have liked to have seen the development of the affair, the connections, the inevitable collision of events but the back and forth destroys part of the natural momentum of gravity and inertia of the sequences of events, the cause and effect that appears to push the various characters towards the end.

[Chris Knipp]

This is definitely one of the more interesting movies of the latter part of the year, and the acting is hard to fault, particularly of course Hoffman and Hawke's. I think Oscar is overcompsnsating however on the one significant fault in the screenplay when he says that the intertitles make the time scheme perfectly clear--the fact is, when Lumet got the screenplay, he eventually realized that the time shifts were very far from completely clear (he said this at the NYFF press Q&A) and he had to work on that with the intertitles to make it clear. I still find the structure unclar and unnecessarily distracting, and for me, so irritating that it detracts from the enjoyment of the movie. It to me shows a certain amateurishness from the first-time unknown screenwriter, a bad influence of Tarantino, perhaps. . ..

I'll post my NYFF review below.

I repeat though, among American films of 2007, and especially speaking as a fan of noir-crime films, this is one of the more interesting ones, even though it is to my mind flawed. Lumet is rather amazing, a man in his eighties--but we live in the age of the nonegenarian directorl. . .

[Chris Knipp]

Sidney Lumet's BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD

Like a train wreck

Review by Chris Knipp

This movie directed by the 83-year-old Sidney Lumet brings to mind Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Depending on how you look at it, Tarantino is either the grand master or the infamous originator of the scrambled time-line. Reservoir Dogs begins after a disastrous failed jewelry store robbery and follows, with overlapping chronologies, the subsequent behavior of various participants who wind up in a warehouse. The title of this new botched jewelry store heist picture comes from an Irish toast: May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. According to Lumet, the screenplay came in over the transom from one Kelly Masterson. Lumet wasn't sure, at a press Q&A, if Masterson was a man or a woman, so they don't seem to be close. Lumet did the rewriting. This included making the primary characters behind the robbery not just friends but brothers—a very important touch, because it turns the movie into a story of total family meltdown so intense and fatalistic it's been compared to Greek tragedy.

When we meet them, nothing is going very well for either elder brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) or baby brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Andy is embezzling his company to pay for his expensive drug habit. Things aren't clicking between him and his wife Gina (Marisa Tomei), and unbeknownst to Andy, Gina's sleeping with Hank. Hank's in deep financial trouble and behind in his child-support. He's a lovable loser who seems barely capable of delivering a pizza— which makes you wonder why Andy should want to talk him into carrying out a robbery..What Andy doesn't own up to at first is that the place to be robbed is their own parents' "mom and pop" strip mall jewelry store. Holding that back from the audience to surprise us with it later seems to be maybe the main reason for the scrambled time scheme. Hank knows he can't do a robbery himself. He secretly enlists a seedy character he knows named Bobby (Brian F. O'Byrne) to enter the store while he waits in a rental car.

Bobby's a tough guy all right, but hey, none of these boys is the sharpest knife in the drawer. Bobby makes a hash of the heist, and in the process of getting himself killed, also shoots Hank and Andy's own mother (Rosemary Harris), who just happens to be minding the shop that day because an employee couldn't make it.

Reservoir Dogs skips the actual robbery scene, which instead is reconstructed indirectly in subsequent dialogue. Masterson/Lumet's screenplay includes the scene of the disastrous robbery, then goes back and forth over the four days prior to it and the week following it in chronologically scrambled segments. These are a problem. Lumet had to add labels giving date and point of view for them, because he himself couldn't follow where they fell in the time-line. What you can't tell on viewing the film is why they need to be so scrambled other than to conceal, for a while anyway, how dumb this robbery scheme is. They certainly do show what a lot of trouble the brothers are in, before they make things a whole lot worse.

Lumet knew this plot-based movie would need great acting to put across the characters and screw the emotions up to a fever itch. He began by hiring on an ace performer, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was given choice of which brother to play. Then Hawke was called in; and Hawke gives a surprisingly strong performance as a weak man. Albert Finney as Charles, the father, naturally maintains the intensity level. And Tomei fits. The cops aren't helpful, so Charles decides to find out on his own who staged this robbery, and he seems to know where to look. Bobby had a kid, and the brother of the kid's mother, Dex (Michael Shannon), who's no more fun to be with than Bobby, comes looking for Hank, and finds him. Excrement hits fan.

Before the Devil excels in its powerful evocation of total meltdown. But it reads as something that goes too slow at first, than rushes too much at the end. Lumet, who's astonishingly vigorous at 83 and is said to work incredibly fast still, calls this story "melodrama," which he defines as requiring suspension of disbelief and the unrolling of events at shocking speed. Arguably too much happens at the end for us to care, and though it's by intention that not everything is explained about how the characters end up, the ending really provides less the catharsis of Greek tragedy than the sensation of having witnessed a train wreck. The element of Tarantino that you most miss is his voluptuously absurd dialog (the talk here is relatively pedestrian). You also keenly miss Tarantino's use of the well-placed dramatic pause. The Devil needs to take some breaks. Yet despite its flaws, this is still one of the year's freshest, best-acted crime pictures.

[This is a revised version of my original NYFF review.]

[tabuno]

Wow!! Sidney Lumet as a director at 83 years old appears to have saved this movie with his rewrite. To bad that the screenplay was so botched. It would have been interesting to have seen what Mr. Lumet could have done with the energy of youth years earlier. He may have had an opportunity to direct a true classic. From friends to brothers as jewelry conspirators was a brilliant change! Thanks for fleshing out the real story. You just demonstrated how good Lumet is still.

[Chris Knipp]

I saw him at the press Q&A at the NYFF screening of the film. He is amazing. He didn't seem like an 83-year-old at all Great clarity and sureness in speech. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a 'botched' script. It had this flaw, which he corrected. I still find it unsatisfactory, but Lumet was probably wise to keep the chronological collage as it was, and only provide clear guidelines so viewers can follow. But I find the shifts jolting and unnecessary. I'd like somebody to prove I''m wrong. This would be a great topic for a discussion in a film class. It spoiled the movie for me. But I realize the film is alive, and the acting is great. If the time shifts are necessary, please somebody tell me why.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp:


But I find the shifts jolting and unnecessary. I'd like somebody to prove I''m wrong. This would be a great topic for a discussion in a film class. It spoiled the movie for me. But I realize the film is alive, and the acting is great. If the time shifts are necessary, please somebody tell me why.

[MAJOR SPOILER ALERT]

The major reason for the time shifts is to hide a crucial fact about the attempted robbery of the jewelry store [spoiler info edited out and left as footnote below]. Apparently somebody thought that this was really a neat idea and that in hiding the fact until later in the movie would be a nice psychological hit in the mind experience that it justified having the robbery further upfront and then the revelation of the relationships of the main characters. Unfortunately, this twist and flashbacks aren't weighty enough to really justify the overall thrust of the movie - [spoiler info edited out and left as footnote below].



________

Footnote Spoiler:

"involved one's own parents."

"that of dealing with the betrayal within the family that occurred."

[Chris Knipp]

WE ARE REVEALING TOO MUCH FOR FUTURE VIEWERS HERE, tabuno. . .

I'm sure you're right though. That is probably the basic intent in the tricks played with chronology--to hold back information about the details of the crime. However there are other ways of doing that, with a less jerky effect. I don't know all the details--of if Lumet said I forget--about who other than he worked on the screenplay after it was accepted 'over the transom' from newcomer screenwriter Kelly Masterson--butI still tend to feel that Masterson's work was used otherwise with little lteration other than the time markers. And I think it has some raw power and explosive scenes, but in some ways lacks polish.

[tabuno]

YES! I got caught up in my response without issuing the mandatory spoiler warning. DARN. That's the problem of trying to do too many things at the same time. I've been reading on Rational Recovery, Ohso's The Spiritual path, reading the newspaper, and trying to clean up at the same time.

[oscar jubis]

This is one film that would be spoiled by knowing anything about its plot beforehand, hence my very brief, thread-opening review. I approached it totally in the dark and enjoyed how the mysteries unfold. My wife and daughter watched it based on my recommendation and report not feeling disoriented as to time and place at all. Not that disorientation is necessarily a bad thing (for instance, it's fun to make sense of Memento after it's over, when it's possible to do so). As far as Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, avoid the reviews and go watch it.

[Chris Knipp]

I agree and try not to give away important revelations of plot -- or idea -- in new films. Of course other than that, it depends on what one means by "spoiled." Does it "spoil" Hemlet to know what heppens to the Dane? Such spoiling implies the childish surprise of a kid opening Christmas presents. . . which he probably knows anyway because they were one his list sent to Santa Claus.

And after one sees the movie--should one still ignore the reviews? And intelligent discussion of the pros and cons?

[oscar jubis]

I hope you are being sarcastic. Why would one need to ignore the reviews once the spoilable mystery aspects are known? Enjoying the performances and other aspects would, clearly, not be spoiled by prior knowledge of the plot. No need to bring up Papa Noel to make points that are too obviously correct to merit discussion.

[Chris Knipp]

None of that was meant for you.