I have wanted to see Sidney Lumet’s film Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead ever
since it came out in 2007. I have caught
up with it a last, and I am glad I did.
The title comes from the Irish toast: "May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for your head; may
you be 40 years in heaven, before the devil knows you're dead" and it
was in fact Lumet’s last film before he died in 2011. It hardly the kind of film you would expect
from an 83 year old. It is fast and
furious, with sex and violence aplenty.
Lumet once said ‘melodrama is a
much maligned genre. And I hope we can
bring it back into fashion. I always think of melodrama as the thing we are all
capable of that's swept under the rug.’
This movie is certainly a
melodrama. The action, which typically
for a Lumet film takes place over only a few days and is set in New York,
pitches us headlong down a helter-skelter slide to hell, starting with a simple
plan to rob a suburban jewelry store and ending up with a high body count and a
family violently torn apart. Even the chronology is disruptive, tossing
us back and forth in time. We also get
different camera angles when we return to a scene we have previously left. Lumet had done a lot of work in TV, and was used to using a
number of cameras to shoot a scene.
Many of Lumet’s films present or explore moral dilemmas. Here we see the dreadful consequences of
what seems to be one bad decision, but it is one that grows out of too many
previous moral failures. It might invite us to consider what our own
capacity for evil might be when push comes to a mighty shove. And what we might have done to bring about
that shove.
Lumet was always an actor’s Director, maybe because he had worked as
an actor himself, and over his long career he drew many Oscar nominated - and
in four cases Oscar winning - performances from (among others) Katharine
Hepburn, Rod Steiger,
Al Pacino,
Ingrid
Bergman, Albert Finney,
Faye Dunaway,
Chris Sarandon, Peter Firth,
Richard Burton,
Paul Newman,
James Mason,
Jane Fonda
and River Phoenix.
That list tells its own story. His directorial career started with 12 Angry Men
(1957) and included The Pawnbroker (1964), The Hill
(1965) Serpico
(1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), Equus (1977) Running On Empty (1988) and Q & A
(1990). In fact he has 73
Directorial credits, 43 of them for
theatrical movies.
In Before The Devil he was reunited with Albert Finney (their previous
collaboration was thirty years previously in Murder on the Orient Express,
a rather untypical Lumet effort), Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei , and Philip
Seymour Hoffman. He has not worked with
any of these three before, nor with his cinematographer, Ron Fortunato, but
they worked well together – maybe because Lumet always made time for rehearsal
before shooting began, and was willing to go to extremes to allow his players
to relax on the set.
The movie draws
remarkable performances from his lead actors.
Hoffman dominates, because his character does, a charismatic and seemingly successful
professional who has run himself into deep financial trouble and has a ‘simple
plan’ to get himself, and his brother - who is a failure in so many dimensions - out
of it. Ethan Hawke also gives a remarkable
performance, falling apart on screen. Marisa
Tomei amazes in many ways, not least in her willingness to expose herself
physically as well as emotionally. (Lumet
told the whole crew to strip when filming her naked. I said he would go to extremes for his cast). Albert Finney’s role as the father of the
two men slowly grows in importance, building to a powerful and properly
melodramatic finale.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is exciting, engaging, emotionally complex and visceral. A good note, though hardly a grace note, to
end Sydney Lumet’s remarkable career.
