WhatzUp

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
by Derek Neff

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead opens with husband and wife Andy and Gina (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei) having sex while on vacation in Rio. They’ve had their problems in the past (just how bad we don’t realize right away), but Andy and Gina are having fun now, and they don’t want this re-established connection between them to stop when their vacation ends and they return to their condo in NYC. It’s a great sequence, one that resonates in a bittersweet way throughout the remainder of the film. Andy is never like he is in this opening scene again, but without seeing this side of him the movie would have been a good deal less engaging. Andy’s motivation for what he does next is not money just for the sake of having money, it’s money as a means to get him back to the place he is with Gina in Rio.

Once back in NYC Andy hatches a plan to rob a mom-and-pop jewelry store in the suburbs with his weak-willed brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Hank is three months behind on his child support payments and can’t seem to find a break. Hank doesn’t find out until later that the place in question is actually their own parents’ store. Andy, who has a serious drug problem and who is also about to land in some very hot water once the IRS finds out he’s been embezzling money from his employer, is anxious to get the job done, like, yesterday, while spineless Hank is anxious to pay his ex-wife what he owes her and then leave the city – hopefully with Andy’s wife, with whom he’s been having an affair.

If Reservoir Dogs is a heist film in which we never actually see the heist, Devil is a heist film in which we see the heist near the very beginning, so we know from the get-go how badly things turn out (most of the movie is told in splintered flashbacks from the various characters’ points-of-view(.

Devil is directed by Sidney Lumet, who is now in his 80s but who directs here with all the snap and brio of someone half his age. (Lest we forget, Lumet also directed arguably the king of all heist films, 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon.)

Andy and Hank don’t so much have character arcs as they have character plummets. They’re such pathetic creatures it’s hard to pull for them at all. The way the movie splinters off – showing different events from differing points of view, going back and forward in time – feels just right. The overriding sense we get is that with characters this messed up the story couldn’t have been told otherwise.