Beat the parents

>> Family heist film Before the Devil Knows
You’re Dead is a mercilessly entertaining return
to form for director Sidney Lumet

by MARK SLUTSKY

What a great surprise that Sidney Lumet’s latest film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, has turned out to be one of the year’s best. Lumet, now in his 80s, has over a long career directed some of the best American movies ever—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, 12 Angry Men. But in recent decades, his output hasn’t been nearly as strong; to name but a few, there was the disastrous Gloria remake with Sharon Stone, the Rebecca De Mornay/Don Johnson potboiler Guilty as Sin and Melanie Griffith as a grizzled cop going undercover as a Hasidic Jewess for the truly insane A Stranger Among Us. So Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a very welcome return to form, a movie as sharp and engrossing as the director’s best work.

It’s basically a “heist-gone-wrong” movie, but Lumet’s approach is darker and less flashy than the countless Tarantino imitators that ground the sub-genre into the dust in the late ’90s. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers, each a fuck-up in his own particular way: Hoffman is a successful exec who’s been skimming from the pile and who’s about to get audited, while Hawke is a charming loser who’s perpetually broke and worried he’s a bad father. (He also happens to be carrying on with Hoffman’s depressed wife, played by Marisa Tomei.) Hoffman hatches a plan to get them both solvent: they’ll rob a strip-mall jewellery store—their parent’s (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) store in particular.

It won’t be spoiling anything—as the movie, which is mostly composed of artful flashbacks and temporal leaps, reveals this in the first scene—to say that things don’t go quite as planned; in fact they go very, very badly. And from there, everything just gets worse and worse until Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead becomes almost comically grim.

Lumet keeps you at some distance from the characters; you watch the disaster unfold with horrified, exhilarated fascination. Hoffman and Hawke are both amazing, and Tomei brings a depth to her character that might have been missed by a lesser performer. And Finney, by the end, seems like a wrathful character out of the Old Testament. Lumet deserves serious respect for crafting a movie this mercilessly entertaining at this late stage of his career.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
opens this Friday, Nov. 23

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