Before The Devil Knows Your Dead

I

In 1970, Sidney Lumet said, “If you’re a director, then you’ve got to direct…. I don’t believe that you should sit back and wait until circumstances are perfect before you and it’s all gorgeous and marvelous…. I never did a picture because I was hungry…. Every picture I did was an active, believable, passionate wish. Every picture I did I wanted to do…. I’m having a good time.”

Subsequently Mr. Lumet, in a statement posted on IMDB, said, “If I don't have a script I adore, I do one I like. If I don't have one I like, I do one that has an actor I like or that presents some technical challenge. With Before The Devil Knows Your Dead Mr. Lumet had all of it: great script and actors, and a technical challenge. He shot the movie in HD, and until you read the credits at the end, you believe you’re watching film. “Anything you can do with film, I can do with HD,” Mr.Lumet proudly stated upon completing the film. Another triumph for this great America director, 83 years of age, but obviously young at heart.

Lumet, God bless him, has been directing since 1953, earning his chops the same time television was, doing shows like Danger, I Remember Mama and You Are There. He would move on to direct about 200 teleplays for Playhouse 90, Studio One, and Kraft Television Theater—the “Golden Age of Television”--establishing himself as one of the most prolific and talented directors of the small screen, specializing in intimate, intense, character driven, social realist dramas. Directing in black and white on a low budget, he capitalized on close-ups and medium shots on constricted sets to forge an intense, intimate mise en scene which would become his visual signature, and which would serve him exquisitely well in his subsequent, brilliant film career.

Directing small-scale also compelled Lumet to work closely with his actors exploiting rehearsals to prepare them for rapid production. Lumet, because of these factors, is often accused of working carelessly. Nonetheless he has garnered four Academy Award Nominations for Best Director. Actors know he deserved at least that many. Ethan Hawke, on a recent Charlie Rose show, cited Lumet as one of the few directors he has worked with who understands an actor’s process and language. His exceptional ability to draw high-quality, sometimes extraordinary performances is proven by seventeen acting nominations from his movies, four of who went on to win. The tight schedule focuses the mind, keeping them in the moment.

They portray Lumet protagonists whose passion and intensity threaten to devour them. They could be difficult, driven by an unyielding superego, like Al Pacino’s Serpico (1973), whose incorruptibility and disgust with police practices unleashed a Mayoral investigation into police corruption. Sometimes they are already devoured when we first meet them, as in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), where the Al Pacino character is, this time, a desperate bank robber who wants to get his ex-boyfriend a sex change operation.

Perhaps Lumet’s most complex protagonist is Bob Leuci, played with the just the right amount of narcissism by Treat Williams. Prince of the City (1981) is to BFP Lumet’s masterpiece, and easily the best movie about American criminal justice yet made. Not fully appreciated by the critics and the public possibly because it is so unrelentingly honest and scathing in its panorama of the way justice is negotiated, not unlike getting a birds-eye view of how sausage is made.

The film presents Leuci’s journey as a tragic odyssey through a labyrinth. Leuci presided over an elite group of undercover cops given wide legal latitude to apprehend the drug dealers running rampant in the frontier New York of the seventies. The leeway granted them proved too much and instead of being the solution, their corrupt actions became part of the problem.

Leuci, probably for reasons he himself still doesn’t fully understand, stemming from a hash of righteousness, guilt, self-destructiveness and self-hate cooperated with a New York State special investigation of his unit, ultimately resulting in scores of indictments of his colleagues, including one detective’s suicide. Leuci, who obviously thought he knew the system as well as anyone, discovers it’s even worse; faceless and corrupt, lumbering along in “a nightmare of moral ambiguity that is indistinguishable from madness,” (Richard Schickel in his review of Prince of the City for Time Magazine) driven by ugly trade-offs, betrayals, and trickery. Leuci too late realizes that he can’t prevent, as he thought he could, the avalanche of arraignments ensnaring his buddies. Often those closest to the flames are the most naïve, how else would they be able to keep functioning?

How criminal justice operates, not only in New York, but also throughout Western nations (Consider The Hill (1965)or The Offence (1973) for instance.) is one of two Lumet signature preoccupations. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead deals with the second.

II

Beginning with Phillip Seymour Hoffman fucking his wife, the luscious Marisa Tomei (She remains one of the most beautiful women in movies: Sensual lips, dark eyes, black hair, and a disarmingly infectious smile.), while vacationing in Rio, Mr. Lumet certainly has our complete attention. “I’d love to live like this,” she says. Their subsequent dialog leads us to suspect good sex doesn’t happen often for them. Even before the first scene in Manhattan, one suspects it’s about New Yorkers, Lumet characters, like Scorsese’s, live and breathe New York’s edginess and energy.

Lumet pieces the early sequences together with a Tarentino flashback style going back and forth to and from a robbery in a suburban mall, each time giving us more crucial backstory. Day 1: The elderly woman behind the counter of the jewelry store, the target of the crime, pulls a gun from a drawer as the confident masked gunman strips the jewelry displays. She fires and fatally wounds the man, but not before he returns fire. Neither survives. A getaway driver, horrified, flees.

The next caption, “3 Days Before the Robbery,” sets up the foundation. As two brothers, Andy (Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) watch a young girl’s little league baseball game, first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson shrewdly implies money poses a problem for both men--each secretly hopes the other will pay for the franks and beer. Middle class men in their prime, and each are not earning enough to cover their expenses. Hank, divorced, but still sharing a house with his ex, hasn’t met his child support payments for months. To compound his problem, Hank also insists his daughter attend a ritzy private school.

Andy mocks Hank as they share a table at a bar demeaning him as a fag. He has a plan to solve Hank’s financial problems: “Lets do a robbery.” When Hank demurs, Andy bullies him some more, “when will you grow up?” Not surprisingly, Hank changes course. The plan is to steal and fence the jewelry from their parents’ jewelry store. That’s the great advantage: they know the ins and outs, where the alarms are, where the drawer containing the keys to open the glass displays is. On Saturdays, an elderly employee opens up; she won’t have any reason to fight off an armed thief. At any rate Hank will use a toy gun. No one gets hurt and the only victim is the insurance company.

Hank, appalled, wants out but feels somehow obligated. It’s a tribute to Hawke's’ acting that we completely accept Hank’s timidity, his awe of his smarter and wealthier brother. Andy claims Hank must do the actual crime as Andy was recently at the mall and would be quickly recognized. Hank never spots the flaw in this story, that the woman at the register would easily identify either brother.

Both men work for a real estate firm, Andy the payroll manager, Hank some sort of underling. Hank takes a long lunch to rendezvous with none other than Andy’s wife, Gina (Ms. Tomei), whom he professes to love. She makes no such commitment to him. Andy, it turns out, needs money for more than monthly vacations to Rio. He is embezzling the firm to feed his cocaine habit, and with an IRS audit set for next Monday, he must acquire quick cash to replace what he stole. Andy figures the theft would net a fast $60,000 apiece.

Hank recruits a bartender, Bobby, whom he also owes money to, as his partner to be getaway driver and lookout. But Bobby, seeing Hank is new at this, takes over using a real gun. As we already know, the robbery is botched, but we now learn that it was Hank and Andy’s mother who opened the store this morning.

Upon learning who the victim was, Andy cries, “If we had to take someone out, why couldn’t it be him,” referring to his father. Here Lumet introduces his other great thematic concern: How children inadvertently or deliberately become burdened by the aspirations of their parents. From Lumet’s first masterpiece, his film adaptation of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962) through Running on Empty (1988) and Family Business (1989) the wounds caused by family dysfunctions leave permanent scars for Lumet’s protagonists.

The script unfolds with intense unyielding power; complications make the stakes higher as the brother of Bobby’s girl friend demands a $10,000 settlement to keep quiet about what his sister knows. Next, Charles (Albert Finney), the stern father of the two boys, cannot accept that a low life from Red Hook, Brooklyn would travel all the way to Westchester to commit a robbery unless someone put him up to it. Since the police believe the case is closed, he begins his own investigation.

Finney plays Charles as someone whose anger is always beneath the surface, usually manifested only by crankiness, as in his complaining about having to take another eye test for his driver’s license renewal, but his overpowering grief over his wife’s death makes him into a prototypical Lumet protagonist resolute in his determination to find out the truth.

At their mother’s wake, Charles acknowledges the great failure of his life, his harsh, unforgiving, excluding attitude towards Andy. He apologizes, but Andy, who could never understand or countenance his father's doting on his wimp of a younger brother, (He should check in with his wife on the matter, she certainly found qualities in Hank missing in her liar of a husband.) will have none of it.

His rage and resentment palpable, Hank explains how it feels to be the one member of the family who his parents feel does not belong. He tells Charles their rejection makes him wonder if Charles is really his father (Add the unnecessary hurting of others to the list of defects his wife might cite.), a remark for which Charles slaps him in the face. Hoffman, despicable before this scene, obviously remains so at its conclusion. But in our learning what makes him so vicious, we also learn the depths of his pain. Script, direction and brilliant acting transform Andy from a one-dimensional paragon of evil. We’re still not sympathetic, but now we know him.

Meanwhile Gina admits her affair with Hank, and that she’s leaving Andy. Making for a quartet of excellent performances, Ms. Tomei’s look and hesitancy make it clear she is pleading for Andy, the man she does love, to beg her to stay. But Andy, blinded now by still another family betrayal, lets her go.

A. O. Scott, in his review for The New York Times eloquently explains what we are watching:

The evil in this world arises not out of any grand metaphysical principle, but rather from petty, permanent features of the human character: greed, envy, stupidity, vanity. There are no demons on display, just small, sad, ordinary people. The filmmakers rigorously tally the results of their sins, minor lapses made monstrous by the failure of love and the corruption of ambition. Simple, familiar desires — for money, sex, status,
respect — end in murder.

With the walls ready to tumble on the brothers, Lumet has set the viewer up for a tumultuous grand guignol and a tragic dénouement. Dana Stevens, in her review for Slate applauded the “claustrophobic suspense and deep compassion for its characters—abject, grasping everymen who truly believe they're only one act of violence away from everything they've ever wanted.” The bank robbers played by Pacino and John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon can be described the same way. We know and understand them. This deep compassion is a hallmark of Lumet at his best and why he is one of America’s great directors.