Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2007

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Sidney Lumet
USA, 2007
English 123 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Before The Devil Knows, Inc.
Executive Producer: David Bergstein
Producer: Michael Cerenzie, Brian Linse
Screenplay: Kelly Masterson
Cinematographer: Ron Fortunato
Editor: Tom Swartwout
Production Designer: Christopher Nowak
Sound: Dave Paterson
Music: Carter Burwell
Principal Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Rosemary Harris
Production: Before The Devil Knows, Inc.

This scabrous, provocative work of film noir comes from one of cinema’s more intriguing masters. Sidney Lumet’s extraordinary career has delighted in unsavoury, complex characters that question the fundamentals of America’s self-image. He is also a gifted director of actors, helping many of the world’s greatest earn countless awards and nominations.

These elements fuse again in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Essentially a botched-heist thriller, it has one chilling, essential twist and a fascinating formal conceit. The twist is that the perpetrators of the heist are two brothers, and their parents own the suburban jewelery store they want to rob. When Mom accidentally (she wasn’t supposed to be working) gets plugged by a hired gun, the boys are left with some pretty tough choices, none of them pleasant.

The performances are simply outstanding. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman play the brothers. Hank (Hawke) is a loser way behind on his child support, while Andy (Hoffman) is a smug and thieving drug addict whose high-powered corporate career is about to crumble around him. Marisa Tomei plays Andy’s wife and Hank’s lover—oops!—with great moxie, while the distinguished Albert Finney electrifies the screen as the boys’ mean-spirited father out for revenge.

The film employs an overlapping time structure, revealing information by retelling the central elements of the story from different characters’ points of view over different days. This allows Lumet to present broader refractions of these easily condemned sleazebags, never justifying their actions but making their all-too-human desperation uncomfortably familiar and conceptually possible.

Lumet’s impressive return to form could not have come at a better time. The tough, angry spirit of seventies cinema embodied in his classic films like Serpico, The Anderson Tapes and Dog Day Afternoon suffuses much of American filmmaking today. This newest film shows that Lumet the guru still has a few surprising tricks up his sleeve.
—Noah Cowan