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A subprime nightmare

Sidney Lumet's new film is bleak and necessary
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 20th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Brotherly concerns. Hawke and Hoffman in Lumet's unrelentingly tragic film.
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Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Directed by Sidney Lumet
With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris and Amy Ryan

There’s a point in the middle of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead where I laughed. But it was a laugh prodded by anxiety, as the only alternative response I could imagine might have required an ambulance and wrist bandages.
There is an unrelieved bleakness to Sidney Lumet’s film of a crime gone wrong, making it one of the most harrowing morality tales to fill screens in ages. Yet this seems to be a year of such films, considering the advance word on the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (which opens in Prague in two weeks) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (scheduled to open toward the end of March).
These films may very well be the better gauge of the age than the well-meaning but turgid film responses to the United States’ wars. Obviously, something is seriously amiss Stateside, something that these three very different films seem to have tapped into.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a film about a botched robbery that spirals frighteningly out of control. Two brothers, Andy and Hank Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) are both recklessly living beyond their means, and decide to rob the jewelry shop owned by their parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris).
As the shop is insured, they know their parents will be compensated for the robbery — everyone will win, and no one need get hurt. That’s the plan. But then everything goes wrong, and people are killed. As inept, first-time thieves, the brothers continually implicate themselves in the disaster by leaving trails of clues. Their panic then drives them into committing ancillary crimes, which will only deepen their desperation and further disturb their sleep.
These lives lived without forethought are quickly hurled into even bloodier situations from which there is no escape. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead comes without the comfort of resolution or even respite. The constant fear and press of necessity leaves all the characters gasping, as if oxygen is being drained from the atmosphere. Laughter, then, from the audience, is a desperate means to attempt expanding one’s own lungs in the face of this airless world.
The performances are startling for their intensity. Hawke is the conscience-stricken younger brother, Hank, sweatily striving to remain in control and failing. Hoffman’s Andy is an emotionally dead man who can only find temporary shelter in drugs.
The actors who play their extended family, all of whom will be dragged into this long day’s journey into a troubling night, are equally mesmerizing. Finney, the haggard, avenging father, is at his fiercest, and the undervalued Marisa Tomei (who hasn’t had a decent role since Factotum two years ago) is electric as Andy’s self-torturing wife.
Lumet’s film is suffused with grays, as so many recent films have been. The air seems leaden, distances are hazy, nothing is clear. The spaces that the characters inhabit seem unlived in — either coldly minimalistic or stuffed with unpacked boxes after hasty moves. The jewelry shop is wedged between a Foot Locker and décor store in a soulless strip mall marooned in the middle of acres of asphalt. Everything is temporary, with only a veneer of prosperity.
This anguish and imbalance that Lumet has tapped like a vein comes like a dread preview of things to come. The Hanson brothers are not evil men, only hopeless and rash. They’ve exhausted their bank accounts and have lived on borrowing. When various bills come due, they’re cornered.
It is bankruptcies colliding with bankrupt morals in a land awash in worthless stock, dead-end jobs and guns. It is a subprime nightmare, a hint to an epic financial meltdown that author James Howard Kunstler calls “the long emergency,” that might only be truly survived with the odd laugh.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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