Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” is Brilliant

For about 9 months out of the year, Hollywood produces movies for 14-year-old boys, focusing mostly on explosions, car chases, girls in bikinis and jokes about bodily functions. Mercifully, the calendar is in the other 3 months. Proof arrived with Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” The cast is powerful and in top form, the script is tight, and the story hops around in time just enough to create a sense of dread and suspense.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers named Andy and Hank Hanson, both of whom are short on cash. To solve the problem, they decide to knock over a Ma and Pa jewelry store in the suburbs, not coincidentally named “Hanson Jewelers.” Naturally, the plot doesn’t work out as expected, but one learns that in the first few minutes. The tale then centers on the increasingly bad decisions of all involved.

Kelly Masterson gets a big hand in a brilliant debut screenplay. By cutting back and forth in time, one day before the robbery, four days before, the day of the robbery, a week later, Mr. Masterson establishes the doomed nature of the venture early on, and lets the sense of inevitable disaster build throughout. It is not easy to write this way, and it is even harder to convince a studio to put out a film that doesn’t follow a clear chronology – the studios think the audience is stupid.

Three years ago, Sidney Lumet won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscar crowd. Next spring, they may have to hand him one for this film. Someone whose name appears on the credits certainly will.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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