Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
almost too much to take, 24 Mar 2008
83 yr. old Sidney Lumet proves he's still got what it takes in this study of family dysfunction. The Hanson brothers, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), are in debt and at each other's throats. In desperation they devise a no-victim robbery of their parent's jewelry store that goes horribly awry. Shown in a series of flashbacks, we're given front row seats to the annihilation of the Hanson family, and it's not pretty. As each new dose of misery is heaped on, you find yourself cringing and wondering why these hapless fools haven't ended it all... it's almost too much to take.
All the performances are first-rate, with Hawke delivering an award-worthy portrait of a man consumed by loss. Hoffman, as always (really - it almost goes without saying), is pitch-perfect. Even Marisa Tomei sizzles (and I'm not usually a fan).
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Indulgent acting mars what might have been a hard-edged story. At least we can see Rosemary Harris show us the real goods, 14 Jun 2008
The contradictions, and especially the indulgences, in Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows Your Dead are queasily evident in the first and last scenes. In the first, which pops up as soon as the lights dim, we have a nude, pale, flabbily fat actor doing Pin the Tail on the Donkey with a nude actress on her knees, hips high, in front of him. The only image that came to mind was of a quivering Moby Dick throwing the harpoon at Mrs. Ahab.
The last scene -- spoilers alert! -- gives us an old man who had to study like a son of a gun just to pass his written driver's test suddenly smart and clever enough to know how to fake out a heart monitor machine in a busy hospital so he could smother to death a gunshot victim and not be caught.
In between these two points are the bones of a hard-edged story of unlikable people that could have been a classic. Instead, we admire the potential but are bored by a lot of the show-off flash. Lumet has always had the reputation of an actors' director, a man who can pull great performances from a cast. Actors, in turn, have always been eager to work with Lumet. At least in part, now we know why. Frequently with this movie, the story, the tension and our interest come to a screeching halt when Lumet permits Philip Seymore Hoffman as Andy to plunge headfirst into "acting"...or to permit Ethan Hawke as Hank to plunge headfirst into "acting"...or to permit the two of them to share intense scenes of "acting," all the while with the camera respectfully observing the performances. Only a disciplined director able to impose his will on actors will be able to convince most actors that less is more. It seldom happens here, and the movie -- despite the potential for classic unhappiness and despite scenes of real tension -- winds up as self-conscious melodrama. This is a frustrating situation because Hoffman is riveting at times as a slick, sick manipulator whose life for quite a while has been on the down escalator. Hawke as Andy's shlumpf of a younger brother is stuck in a losing role as an unsympathetic weakling. Albert Finney as their father, who, with his adored wife, owns a small jewelry store, does Albert Finney again. To give him credit, he picks up steam when his character decides to be the avenging angel.
It's Andy's plan to rob his parents' store that goes bad, but it's Hoffman's indulged acting, approved by Lumet, that's the real crime. Even some of the secondary actors, particularly Michael Shannon as Dex, over emote...and actors playing secondary characters wouldn't do that without the specific encouragement of the director. Rosemary Harris, as the two brothers' mother and Finney's wife, does the real acting. Harris is one of the great actresses of the American and British stage (and the mother of Jennifer Ehle). Her role is brief, just two real scenes. One shows her affection for her aging husband and the other as the frightened victim of the robbery who decides to resist. Harris knows the value of less is more. She gives to a small part real strength and motivation, and makes Finney's motivation for revenge believable. The irony is that while many movie fans will be thrilled by Hoffman's performance, most probably won't even notice how good Harris is or even recognize her name.
Lumet must have been aiming for tragic drama but he wound up with the Hollywood version. This was a real disappoint for me because I have a lot of respect for Lumet and for a number of his actors.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
May you be in heaven half an hour..., 11 Jul 2008
This is a thoroughly diabolical tale of just how bad things can go wrong. A simple robbery. Pick up some serious change. Get our finances together and everything will be hunky-dory. But--mom and pop's jewelry store? No problem. Insurance pays for it all. No guns. Nobody gets hurt. Easy money.
Older, more successful (it would appear) brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has a few minor problems. Heroin addiction, cocaine habituation. A wife (Marisa Tomei) that...well, he can't seem to perform for. His flat belly days long gone. Younger, sweet, slightly dim-witted younger brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke) with a few dinero problems of his own. Behind in child support payments for his daughter, in debt to friends and relatives, not exactly wowing them in the work of work, etc.
Sydney Lumet, in this performance at the age of 82 (!), directs and gets it 99.99 percent right, which is hard to do in a thriller. I have seen more thrillers than I can remember and most of the time the director gets the movie printed and lives with the plot holes, the improbabilities, the cheesy scenes, and the hurry-up ending. Here Lumet makes a thriller like it's a work of art. Every detail is perfect. The acting is superb. The plot has no holes. The story rings true and clear and represents a tale about human frailty that would honor the greatest filmmakers and even the Bard himself.
Hoffman of course is excellent. When you don't have marquee, leading man presence, you have to get by on talent, workmanship and pure concentration. Ethan Hawke, who is no stranger to the sweet, little guy role, adds a layer of desperation and all too human incompetence to the part so that we don't know whether to pity him or trash him. Albert Finney plays the father of the wayward sons with a kind of steely intensity that belies his age. And Marisa Tomei, who has magical qualities of sexiness to go along with her unique creativity, manages to be both vulnerable and hard as nails as Andy's two timing wife. (But who could blame her?)
It's almost a movie reviewer's sacrilege to give a commercial thriller five or ten stars, but if you study this film, as all aspiring film makers would be well advised to do, you will notice the kind of excessive (according to most Hollywood producers) attention to detail that makes for real art--the sort of thing that only great artists can do, and indeed cannot help but do. (By the way, I think there were twenty producers on this film--well, maybe a dozen; check the credits.) All I can say in summation is, Way to go Sydney Lumet, author of a slew of excellent films, and to show such fidelity to your craft and your art at such an advanced age--kudos. May we all do half so well.
Okay, the 00.01 percent. It was unlikely that the father (Albert Finney) could have followed the cabs that Andy took around New York without somehow losing the tail. This is minor, and I wish all thrillers could have so small a blip. Also one wonders why Lumet decided not to tell us about the fate of Hank at the end. We can guess and guess. Perhaps his fate fell onto the cutting room floor. Perhaps Lumet was not satisfied with what was filmed and time ran out, and he just said, "Leave it like that. It really doesn't matter."
And I think it doesn't. What happens to Hank is not going to be good. He isn't the kind of guy who manages to run off to Mexico and is able to start a new life. He is the kind of guy who gets a "light" sentence of 10 to 20 and serves it and comes out a kind of shrunken human being who knows he wasn't really a man when he should have been.
See this for Sidney Lumet, one of Hollywood's best, director of The Pawnbroker (1964), The Group (1966), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and many more.
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