It would seem that a character like Andrew Hanson has gotten all that he could ask for in life. The first scene of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead finds Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) making love to his gorgeous wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), in a luxury hotel.
With a cushy office job, an apartment straight out of a Crate & Barrel advertisement and two kindly parents waiting for him back in New York, he's clearly made out a lot better than most pompous, pudgy middle-agers would in the real world. Naturally it comes as something of a shock when Andy concocts a plan to rob the jewelry store that his father and mother have owned for decades.
The life of Hank Hanson, in contrast, looks like limbo from his first frame on. Played by Ethan Hawke, Hank comes off as an eternal, overgrown kid brother - a compilation of twitches, tics and puppy-like trust, depleted by child support payments to an exasperated ex-wife (Amy Ryan) and a daughter who calls him a loser. This desperation makes him the most pliable accomplice his older sibling could ask for. According to Andy's plan, all Hank has to do is break inside the store right after it opens - when his father, Charles (Albert Finney), and his mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), will be nowhere in sight - scare the saleslady, grab the goods and run. Insurance will cover everything and each brother will be a few hundred grand richer.
To say much more about the events of director Sydney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead would be to compromise one of the year's most engaging and unpredictable films so far.
Of course, things go distressingly wrong on Hank's watch. Yet the cycle of insult, violence and heartbreak that follows in the next few days is the basis for a script that melds close observation with expansive emotions.
Today it is reassuring to find a movie with so many Academy Award laureates or award-hungry performances that avoids the annoying "something for everyone" ensemble vibe that surrounded features like Babel, Crash and Syriana.
A work as spare as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead might lack box office draw and political currency. It relies instead on a self-conscious sense of timelessness and its director's humanistic investment in characters who, usually, are only invested in themselves.
As in his 1976 satirical masterpiece, Network, Lumet here shows an admirable comfort with blatant, logic-defying melodrama. The extremes of outrage, sex and death that earlier served the director as comic ammunition this time yield a share of absurd situations - which might seem amusingly ironic, except that Lumet never relaxes the pitch of his material's tragic overtones.
Lust and ambition assume a primal aura in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Even though screenwriter Kelly Masterson doesn't handle her dramatis personae flawlessly, mutating a family of upstanding New Yorkers into would-be criminals - with any degree of plausibility - is in itself a small, striking achievement.
Granted, it is never easy to exert discipline over a movie that runs like a Manhattan-based fusion of Reservoir Dogs and a couple plays by Tennessee Williams. Lumet's consistently taut camerawork is one of the movie's boons but still provides his actors with plenty of room to operate. This liberty is just what Finney needs to transform Charles from the tri-state area's number-one granddad into a portrait of vindictive pride. And this kind of liberty also allows Hawke and Tomei to play endless variations on the reactions of their none-too-bright characters. As their habits pile up, Hank and Gina quietly emerge as sensitive people.
Consistency, though, can give way to monotony all too easily. Lumet seems comfortable with a score consisting mainly of awesome, ominous brass sequences by Carter Burwell - played over and over until, like the thrice-shown scene of the robbery, it sticks in the audience's brains. This isn't entirely a flaw. But - and the same goes for Tomei's and Hawke's performances-this standardization of methods makes the psychological variety of Masterson's script much harder to discern.
Verging on illogicality and irregularity, Andy poses a different problem. The most compelling motives for his holdup are revealed so late that they feel almost artificial, while Hoffman sometimes strains to get the character right, sometimes coasts spectacularly through his lines.
But Andy is also the richest turn that the Oscar-winner has had, allowing the actor to achieve psychological nuances that his title role in Capote, thanks to a certain over-determined quirkiness, simply prohibited.
It takes a dramatist of Hoffman's potency to craft a portrait of familial treachery and near-villainy without a great, tragic reason. Yet a creation like Andrew Hansen would never have registered without a cinematic maestro and proven actor's director like Lumet at the helm. The brothers' dead-of-morning raid and its tense aftermath may spiral quickly out of control. As a piece of filmic art, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead never even comes close.
