Devilish

It's late and I'm short on both time and wakefulness, but as the mega-long weekend approaches there's an opportunity to see some movies, so I don't want to wait too long to recommend Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. It's a one-way ticket to damnation, something in the air that also rides through No Country for Old Men, but in some ways it makes the Coen Bros film feels like a trip to Disneyland. It's that dark.

One of the more astonishing aspects of BTDKYD is that the director, Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Serpico, Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men, The Anderson Tapes, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Pawnbroker, Network...need I go on?), is 83 years old, having won his lifetime achievement Oscar three years ago at 80. There's none of the slackening of vision that often comes with "geriatric" filmmakers, no weakening of shot rigor or logic. Taking a script by newcomer Kelly Masterson and reportedly changing the lead characters from friends to brothers, he's made a Greek tragedy wrapped up as a tightly-wound crime thriller. Think Agamemnon set in NYC and Westchester; Oedipus noir.

The basic story is of two brothers, one apparently successful, the other just barely hanging on, who decide to stick up their parents' mall-located jewelry store to pay off various debts. The heist goes horribly wrong and the moral conundrums pile on. The story is told in fits of flashbacks and flash-forwards, but while such a narrative gimmick may have provided the delight of its own cleverness in earlier pictures (Reservoir Dogs comes to mind), in this instance it feels maybe a little less obviously clever and more a necessary method for conveying the moral structure of the story. That is to say, fractured at best.

The cast is brilliant and unexpected. Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant in the lead, the dominant brother, his trademark technique of smiling at some sort of inward, private joke (the kind that conveys his intelligence and draws one closer in hopes of being let in on it) is here perversely charismatic, a man who has all the moves figures out if only they'd behave. Ethan Hawke is also great as his brother, conveying the endless panic of a man caught in a life-changing plan gone bad, his conscience like an endless earthquake. Albert Finney, who interestingly played famed Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot in Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express, is the missing motivational piece as the father, and Marisa Tomei once again demonstrates her commitment and skill, making my movie-going companion wonder why she's not used more often.

Movies like this one and Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan have a particularly nasty edge for cash-strapped or even cash-conscious yuppies, and it's what makes their knives particularly sharp. They're modern cautionary tales, not distanced enough to make the medicine go down easily, hence more courageous than a lot of other films. It was a sold-out Sunday night audience in Brooklyn for the Lumet picture, and while there wasn't a lot of feel-good applause at the end, there was that good kind of silence I used to remember from well-made, honest, powerful dramatic pix I saw as a kid.

Back when Sidney Lumet was in his heyday.