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