An exercise in scorn

by B. J. Carter
Coastal Journal staff

None of the characters in Sydney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead exhibit redeemable qualities.  None of them.  The film is one endless circle of ugliness - the characters do bad things and bad things happen to them in return.  The fact that I was chuckling to myself as the credits rolled is a testament to Lumet’s undiminished skills at 83 years of age.

Before the Devil Knows tells the tale of two brothers, Andy and Hank Hanson (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, respectively) in desperate need of cash for very different reasons.  Saddled with a nasty drug habit, Andy’s been cooking the books at the Manhattan real estate company where he works, and Hank owes his ex-wife (Amy Ryan) thousands of dollars in child-support.  They concoct a plan to rob their parents’ jewelry store, which they know inside/out from having worked in it.  Additionally they figure it will be a victimless crime, since the insurance will cover their parents. 

Needless to say, the robbery doesn’t go as planned - it can’t.  In the movies, familial crime is always met with a particularly harsh fate.  Before the Devil Knows doesn’t deviate much from the formula, and it doesn’t much care to.  The botched robbery is the first item on the menu; the rest of the movie devotes itself to the Hanson family’s extreme dysfunction, including Hank’s relationship with Andy’s wife (a thankless turn by Marissa Tomei) and a contentious relationship between Andy and his father (Albert Finney).  It’s a movie much more interested in archetypes - Cain-and-Abel sibling rivalry, Oedipal sin, and of course the Bloody Third Act - than rigorously plotting a heist.

There’s no reason to feel sorry for anyone in the film, so we laugh at them, although to Ethan Hawke’s tremendous credit he plays Hank so haplessly that it’s hard not to take some measure of pity on him, and in other instances the humor takes a backseat to genuine disgust and horror.  But there’s really no need for a moral compass here.  As the film plods dutifully to its violent conclusion, we figure this shadowy universe (shot brilliantly by Robert Fortunato) will correct itself on its own.

Hailed as a “masterclass” from 83 year-old legend Sydney Lumet, the major flaw in Before the Devil Knows is just that - it feels like a class, a filmmaker’s workshop.  The pacing is carefully measured, the acting, especially from the two leads, is superb, and the editing is self-consciously stylized.  It works well as an exercise in scornful comedy but doesn’t travel much deeper than that.  And really, that’s fine.  American comedies (and “capers,” for that matter) are notoriously brainless, so I’ll take the overly-brainy one any day.