Old Yorker

  • Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (2007)

    The title – which derives from an Irish saying (‘May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the devil knows you’re dead’) – is the best thing about it.   This was Sidney Lumet’s last film so it’s a pity it isn’t better, although it was well received by critics anyway.   Lumet’s admirers would have enjoyed the trademark gritty New York City settings but Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is also characteristic in the relentless extremity of human predicament which it describes – with plenty of overacting to match.  These were persistent limitations of Lumet’s work.   I dozed during Richard Combs’s introduction to the BFI screening but I seem to think he concluded by saying, ‘Welcome to the world of evil’.  If so, the world of evil is a monochrome world:  the tone of Before the Devil is insistent and unvarying, and both the look of the movie and its soundtrack unnecessarily reinforce a point which you’ve got within the first fifteen minutes (of slightly more than two hours of running time).  The dark shadows of Ron Fortunato’s images are just about inescapable until the final white-out.  A couple of Carter Burwell’s chords recall the score for The Godfather part II but nothing else does:  the lack of variety makes the movie merely and tiresomely melodramatic.

    The narrative is fragmented according to the fashion of (much younger directors of) the decade in which Before the Devil was made.  The pivotal event is the robbery of the Hanson family’s jewellery store:  this is the brainchild of desperate elder son Andy Hanson and is so badly botched that his mother, who wasn’t meant to be working in the store at the time, gets killed.  Since nearly every scene – whether it takes place before, during or after the robbery – seems like the same scene, the non-linear complication of the story is pointless.  I don’t know if the film reflects the shape of the screenplay that Kelly Masterson wrote but Lumet’s sequencing does nothing to conceal the mechanically worked out ironies, deceptions and betrayals.  The Hansons never suggest a real family.   The cast, on paper, is most impressive.   Philip Seymour Hoffman is Andy and Ethan Hawke his younger brother Hank; Marisa Tomei is Andy’s wife and Hank’s mistress; Albert Finney is the Hanson paterfamilias and Rosemary Harris his unlucky wife; the likes of Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan feature in smaller roles.  I got the sense that nearly all of them had seen too many Sidney Lumet movies and knew their job was to keep emoting as intensely and for as long as they possibly could.  Hoffman and Tomei manage a few moments of relative light and shade – but relative only to Hawke and Finney, who don’t.  Shannon, although hardly at his best, is almost light relief as a character who wants money without, unlike the others, being morally tortured about it.  In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious what you’re in from the moment Hank goes to see his young daughter in her school play – King Lear, with a cast of what look like ten year olds.  It’s a bizarre choice of school play for such young children.  On the other hand, a family tragedy for those with a mental age of ten is one way of describing Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

    11 June 2013

     

     

  • Before I Go To Sleep

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rowan Joffe (2014)

    Ten years ago, Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) suffered brain damage that wipes her memory every night when she falls asleep.  The man she wakes up in bed with next morning (Colin Firth) has to tell her each day (a) that he’s Ben, her husband of fourteen years, (b) what happened to Christine a decade ago and (c) that she’s now approaching forty – not, as she thinks, in her early twenties.  (I didn’t get why the period of her memory loss extended so far back and so long before her brain injury – or how, in that case, she found it so easy to use twenty-first century phones.)  In the bathroom of their London home, Ben has posted a montage of photographs of his and Christine’s life together.  In the kitchen, he’s written helpful instructions to get her through the day once he’s gone to work – he’s a secondary school chemistry teacher.  After Ben has left the house, Christine receives a daily phone call.  The voice on the line says he is Dr Mike Nasch:  he (re)introduces himself as a neuropsychologist who’s trying to help Christine regain memory, and asks her to keep a video diary that will serve as a reminder of who she is.  While Christine learns from Ben that her brain damage is the legacy of an accident, Dr Nasch tells her that she was the victim of a brutal attack and advises her not to tell Ben about the video diary.  Nasch (Mark Strong) has unconventional and clandestine meetings with his patient, in his car.

    This adaptation of S J Watson’s highly successful novel (Rowan Joffe also did the screenplay) is a fairly entertaining psychological thriller although its tone is unvarying.  The film would be more unsettling with less of Edward Shearmur’s standard issue ominous music, which has a protective, only-a-movie effect.  The bleak, disorienting images constructed by Rowan Joffe and his cinematographer Ben Davis, along with the flashback splinters that invade Christine’s nightmares and waking life, reflect rather too neatly her fractured state of mind.  I’ve not read Watson’s book but I know it’s a first person narrative, the storyteller is Christine and the reader must therefore rely on her word to an extent that a film audience doesn’t need to do.  The viewer can decide whether Christine should trust Ben or Dr Nasch or neither of them.  In a story centred on the uncertainty of identity, his admirers might argue that Colin Firth, in making Ben unconvincing, is doing something very skilful but I’m not persuaded.  One has seen Firth’s trademark quiet melancholy too often to be fooled – it’s the actor, not the character, who’s trying and failing to avoid being dully inauthentic.  The proof of this arrives when Ben is revealed to be an impostor:  Firth is just as hollow as the man Ben turns out really to be.  Firth’s only believable moment comes when the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ is playing on a radio in the kitchen and Ben sings along.

    Mike Nasch seems suspicious in several ways:  for a start, he not only works at University College London (or so he tells Christine) but drives a car with a number plate that ends in ‘UCL’!  But Mark Strong’s playing of Nasch is a first-rate demonstration of keeping the viewer guessing the truth about a character in a thriller; with his great combination of warmth and potential menace, Strong achieves this without ever forcing a look or a line reading.  Nicole Kidman, required to be emotionally in extremis almost continuously, is well cast as the weird, kinetically anxious Christine.  Kidman is highly accomplished, if rarely surprising.   With Anne Marie Duff, who does well with her largely expository lines as Christine’s friend Claire, and Adam Levy, who makes a last-minute and, in the happy-ish ending circumstances, oddly spooky appearance as Christine’s real husband.

    9 September 2014

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