Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
by Catherine Lee

Sidney Lumet’s chilling new film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, dissects a crime and a family. Neither hold up well under this examination, and the two are desperately intermingled. Story and characters in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead are bleak, but the film is easy to recommend. The performances are fantastic and the direction is superb. Without mentioning God, morality and justice are inevitable and inexorable forces at work. 

The film begins with a very explicit sexual situation. While the players seem to be deriving pleasure from this coupling, there is something joyless and desperate about them. The mood of desperation and deception continues through every scene and every behavior. It is a startling way to begin the movie and sobers us up for what is to follow.

The players are Andy and Gina, a married couple on a much needed break in Rio. They are hoping to rekindle and reconnect. While the rekindling seems to work, the reconnection doesn’t take. Back in the United States we slowly learn just how lost they both are. Andy is at the center of this story. He seems successful and confident, but what we learn slowly is that he is masking some truly ugly qualities and behavior. He’s endlessly selfish and self-absorbed. He has a serious drug habit and is embezzling money from his company. He is oblivious to everything around him. He doesn’t realize that his kid brother Hank, who works for the same company (no doubt through Andy’s influence), is having an affair with his wife. These brothers need money. Andy needs it for his drug habit and to finance a fantasy “starting over” with Gina. Andy needs it to pay off his truly annoying and hateful ex-wife and support his daughter. 

Andy has a scheme. He thinks they should rob a jewelry store. Or rather, he thinks Hank should rob the store, and he will fence the loot. And all their cares will vanish. And the trick of it is, the jewelry store is owned by their parents. Nobody will get hurt, and their parents' insurance will cover any losses. Andy really seems to believe this will work, and he bluffs his brother into believing the same. If the title doesn’t tell you this is nonsense, the movie does. We see the crime many times during the film from different perspectives. I’ve tried to say as little as possible to set this up. We’ve seen bits of the crime and the set-up long before we learn all that I’ve already revealed about these characters.

When Andy first talks Hank into the crime, we wonder why? Why would Andy even consider it? Why would Hank? How can Andy talk Hank into something so stupid? How can Hank make it even worse, which he does. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead doesn’t proceed – until the last few scenes. Instead it just peels layers off an onion. It goes deeper into the sources of how these brothers became such lost and deeply flawed people. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke break your heart as Andy and Hank. Working from the grim but great screenplay by playwright Kelly Masterson, Lumet makes these actors give everything they’ve got. I think both gentlemen are extremely talented, but the work here is particularly compelling. Andy and Hank are very unattractive characters, and Lumet, known as an actor’s director, has taken their talents and made pitiable characters out of their very unappealing traits. 

But every performance in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is great. Marisa Tomei plays Gina, Andy’s sad, selfish wife. She’s also pitiable, lost in her own self-absorbed haze. She doesn’t seem to do anything but fret about her husband’s lack of attention. Except for the fact that he disappears occasionally, she doesn’t seem to notice he is a drug addict. Rosemary Harris is strong and lovely in her brief performance as Nanette, the mom to these two boys. The various thugs, played by Michael Shannon and Bryan F. O’Byrne, are stupid and ugly. Walking around in this life, you hear about crimes that sound so stupid and horrible you never really want or need to know any of the details. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead goes behind the scenes of a really stupid, pointless crime and in excruciating detail shows you that when you have that sense reading the newspaper or watching the television the crime is just as dumb and ghastly as you imagine.

Particularly sly and wonderful in this film is Albert Finney as the father. He seems lost in grief and confusion. But as his grief crystallizes, he insists on getting to the bottom of what happened. 

The universe in this movie has rules. They may be unseen, but they are absolutely real. You don’t need the threat of religion to suffer the consequences of transgressing. To quote Romans, and specifically the King James edition, “The wages of sin is death.” You don’t need to tack on the promise of salvation through Jesus that follows in this Bible verse for Before the Devil. Lumet, raised a nice Jewish boy, does not need to wait for an afterlife or even bring up the specter of God to put these truths into action. 

As we watch an endless parade of selfishness, sometimes styling as drug use or adultery or other delusions, we know retribution is coming. God doesn’t mete out this punishment. The sins go asking for answering, all on their own. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead strikes me as a very Old Testament formulation, but without even the laws described there needed for the execution of justice. God help me, but it is a very satisfying formulation. 

Various family-values conservatives would like to say that movies have no morality. They should chew on this one. It is a bit of tolerance and humor that the film is titled with only the second half of the Irish blessing, “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.” In this season we ask, “Have I been naughty or nice?” If you want encouragement to be nice, see Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.