Kelly Masterson's script for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead too often underlines its points, telegraphs its surprises and features some unbelievable plot points. If it had been filmed by a typical post-Tarentino tyro, I'd be sitting here complaining.
Instead, 83-year-old Sidney Lumet directed, apparently reworking the script along the way. (Making the thieving, squabbling protagonists brothers was, apparently, Lumet's contribution, and a major one.) Though Before The Devil deals with a heist gone wrong, it's not a caper film. Lumet's done that to death. (The Anderson Tapes, most notably.) And though there's guns and bloodshed, it's not a crime thriller, either. (Though, again, Lumet has plenty of those on his resume.)
Genre elements are played down, as Lumet and his superb cast--Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney--find the absolutely real, breathing characters inhabiting this script. These people are all desperate--brothers Hoffman and Hawke need money, Tomei needs love and Finney's overwhelming grief turns into a desperate, pathetic need for revenge. Lumet never excuses their actions, but never condescends to them, either. We know all too well why they're doing what they're doing.
It's hard to entirely evaluate a movie like Before The Devil based on an initial viewing. Sometimes a film you know is flawed can linger in your memory to the point where its flaws cease to matter. Sometimes a first view produces great admiration, but leaves little further impression. It may be that as I think about certain plot points, Before The Devil will become a lesser film in my mind.
But then I'll remember the extraordinary moments, such as Hoffman's quiet, pathetic rage after his wife leaves him, emotionlessly tearing the sheets off the bed, tossing a plant in the closet, curling up on the mattress, the camera craning over him, finally reaching a godlike, judgmental position.
That scene also shows Lumet's absolute mastery of his material. He's never been a director with a recognizable style; he's always tried to fit the form to the material. In that sense, he's often been underrated, dismissed in many quarters as an "actor's director," as though he doesn't know what to do with a camera.
Oh, but he does. In Before The Devil, Lumet lets each individual scene dictate its own rhythm, its own coverage. Some scenes are furiously cut together, jangled and raw. Some are shot in long takes, or only in master shots. Sometimes the camera is handheld and prying, sometimes it backs away. Most shots make use of naturalistic lighting, but the scene in which Finney's grief reaches its ultimate state features dark, carefully composed colors out of Rembrandt.
This sounds like a clumsy jumble, but Lumet's approach allows every scene to find its own truth, which all add up to one larger truth. The plot mechanics of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead may creak at times, but that emotional truth, its portrait of the slow, sad collapse of one family's American dream, make it one of the most vital and exciting movies I've seen in a long, long time.
