Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Studio: ThinkFilm
Rated: R
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei
Director: Sidney Lumet
WorkNameSort: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Our Rating: 4.50
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a real estate broker with a smack addiction and a dangerously impending IRS audit. Ethan Hawke is his divorced, constantly indebted brother who can’t afford to pay for a field trip for his daughter. Hard up for cash, the men settle on a plot to knock off their parents’ small Westchester jewelry shop. It’s the kind of plot that’s guaranteed to go smoothly, with no deaths and a clean break – but, of course, it turns into a deliciously morbid disaster, leading to more death, debt and destruction than either brother thought possible. It makes the marital kidnapping in Fargo look petty, revealing disturbing areas of the human condition. Unflinchingly violent and explicitly carnal, this is Sidney Lumet’s ballsiest, most visceral film in decades; the 83-year-old craftsman directs with the hipness and energy of a 21-year-old. I’m not sure if the movie’s point-of-view-changing, chronologically shifting, Pulp Fiction-y structure adds anything to the inherently compelling story, but either way the film is loaded with operatic gravity and noirish fatalism. Albert Finney contributes a heartbreaking performance as the brothers’ father.

This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.