BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD [2007]

Often when determining "great" directors, film scholars tend to lean toward the eccentric geniuses, the Coppolas, the Kubricks, the Fellinis.  This focus on directors that make visionary epics painted on broad canvases and who take years to finish a project sometime overshadow the lesser "greats".  The directors who consistently turn out a film every year or two just because they seemingly are truly in love with the craft of moviemaking.  Directors like Robert Altman, who we also lost so recently, who were not above tossing out a dud every so often and even God forbid, working in television.  Workaholics who couldn't stop making movies if their lives depended on it. Sidney Lumet was one "those" great directors.  He had his rough patches, particularly in the late '80's and through the '90's, (Stranger Among Us, anyone?), but  also gave us certifiable masterpieces like Dog Day Afternoon and Network, indelible portraits of people in crisis rushing headlong into the inevitability of their actions.
Though there are no iconic "mad as hell" or "Attica! Attica!" moments in Lumet's last film Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, the queasy intimacy of being privy to the most private of feelings has been rendered here perhaps more acutely than in even those more accomplished works.
  Ostensibly a best laid plans of mice and men tale, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead strips the caper film of it's flash and concentrates on  the pungent  emotions of it's execution and aftermath, slowly peeling the participants down to their raw essence.
The "mouse" in this melodrama is Hank played by Ethan Hawke, and the "man" is Andy played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Andy is a payroll accountant in a large real estate firm who besides supporting a high maintenance wife, is living way beyond his means, skimming from the company to also support  a drug habit and his visits to an expensive male prostitute.  Hank is beyond even knowing what his means are, and is a feckless loser everyman who owes his ex-wife thousands in back child support.  What binds these two characters together is not the fact that they are brothers, there is no sense of love here, but the fact that they are desperate men.  We are never shown how they got to this point but thrust full force into the immediacy of their situation.  Andy, the dominant big brother, has a plan for a robbery and recruits baby Hank to perform it.  This is no elaborate big-budget bank heist, but simply a mom and pop jewelry store that sits next to a Foot Locker in a strip mall. That mom and pop actually are mom and pop doesn't bother amoral Andy in the least, who assures Hank that their parents are covered by insurance and that it's a sure bet that it's the perfect crime.
To say that things go horribly awry is an understatement, and Lumet uses the botched robbery trope as an excuse to examine the nature of intimacy, or lack thereof, to propel the film into the primitive templates of a Biblical or Greek tragedy.  Rarely has a film been so "cold around the heart" as this one while still riveting the viewer to the characters.
It's no surprise that Lumet was known as the "actors director" as he coaxed award worthy performances out of the stars in these unlikable roles.  Hoffman who is fast becoming one of our greatest living actors infuses Andy with a perfect balance of pathos and control.  Hawke who can be a one-note performer, here does a masterful job as the weak and haggard Hank, doing the slow burn to a patented Lumet unravelling.  Marisa Tomei as Andy's wife and Albert Finney as their father are also at the top of their game.
Heady themes aside, the film is also a marvel in the way it's technical elements come together.  Lumet pretty much hauled the whole crew over from his cancelled highly under-rated TV show 100 Centre Street, and their harmony is evident from the stunning claustrophobic photography and editing to the effectively tense soundtrack.
Ultimately Before The Devil Knows You're Dead is the filmic equivalent of Eliot's poem The Hollow Men that states "between the idea and the reality...between the motion and the act...falls the Shadow"  And like the world in the poem the film ends "not with a bang but with a whimper" in a moment between a father and a son that is shocking in that it's probably the closest they have ever been.

Lumet parades these "hollow men" in front of us, showing their despair and emptiness, and yet seldom does a film seem this full.  It's to Lumet's credit that as one of the "greats" he gave us one last lesson in how it should be done.

                                                      RATING: 4  BANANAS