Bill Goodykoontz

Nov. 8, 2007 12:00 AM


Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

tests the limits of endurance: It is without question an expertly made, fantastically acted film.

But it is so relentlessly downbeat, such a harrowing narration of a downward coil that fractures a family, that it's more to be admired than enjoyed. Mightily admired, to be sure - director Sidney Lumet, an old-imbue with basic, is in top form, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is great as a man whose preoccupation is unraveling faster than his best, up the wall and in all respects misguided efforts to salvage it.

Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney are also outstanding. Yet it's all in service to a story that leaves you down in the gutter with the characters, whose lives are practically meaningless by the end of it.

That being said, it's such a well-made movie that any serious film fan would be a fool to miss it.

Hoffman stars as Andy, a scheming sort who has convinced himself he's smarter than he really is, able to finagle his way out of any trap. He's in way over his head at work, where he's embezzling money. His trophy wife (Tomei) is, unbeknownst to him, cheating on him - with his brother. Andy's a drug addict, paying to be shot up by a transvestite as cold as the apartment where he plies his trade.

Feel-good movie of the year so far, eh? It gets worse.

Andy's brain wave is to talk Hank (Hawke), his brother, into helping him rob a jewelry store; it's one, we find out, they know well. To say that the robbery goes spectacularly awry is neither to exaggerate nor to give too much away; we learn the bulk of what will happen in the film in the first 10 minutes or so.

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But Lumet then takes us back in time repeatedly, back before the robbery and then ahead after it, showing us how the whole thing transpires from different characters' points of view. It's not like

Roshomon

- there's not any disagreement in the differing perspectives. We just learn how the characters came to the decisions they've made, how the whole thing came to go so sour for everyone.

Hoffman is amazing, portraying a man who's conning everyone around him, and himself as well. Hawke's Hank, desperate for child-support money, is an easy, pathetic mark. Long-simmering issues surface between Hank and his father (Finney, in a performance that goes from chilly to chilling). Long-simmering issues surface among

everybody

.

It's to Lumet's credit that the audience not only sees the tension but feels it as well. From the first scene, in which Andy and his wife have especially enthusiastic, if creepy, sex, to the final, shattering conclusion,

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

is often an uncomfortable film to sit through, but the rewards it offers make it well worth the effort.


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