By Armond White

Before The Devil Knows Your Dead
Directed by Sidney Lumet


Is the naked, doggy-style sex scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei that opens Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead blunt and repellant because it reflects the personalities of the characters? Or is it just that director Sidney Lumet is incapable of sensuality and tenderness? We see Hoffman and Tomei bumping uglies, but they’re locked in self-gratification: He checks himself out in a nearby mirror, an image meant to shock but is just gruesome.

And Before the Devil goes down the toilet from there. At age 83, Lumet tries getting back to the outrageous satirical mode of Network and Just Tell Me What You Want, but this family dysfunction story—brothers Andy (Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) rob their Mom and Pop’s Westchester jewelry store resulting in calamity—fails the classic requirements of social critique. Kelly Masterson’s first-time screenplay ignores the social elite, falling into the muddled gray area of the middle-class and lower. That’s where money is desperately sought-after, keyed to each person’s misguided notion of happiness. Andy’s a paunchy, sneaky real estate broker, his wife Gina (Tomei) screws with the younger Hank who works in an office wearing a cheap, ill-fitting suit and is up to his weak smile in debt.

Masterson wallows in every character’s monstrous banality. His revelation that all this distrust, betrayal and incompetence stems from unfair parenting is laughable, a degradation of satire. Instead of scrutinizing petit bourgeois greed, he offers us petty Borgias (“Sopranos” clones) in the glum style of HBO realism.

Gullible critics who hail this freak show as a portrait of how we live today should only speak for themselves, but of course, they don’t. Lumet and Masterson make it so easy to be judgmental about sub-mental characters. This moral failure goes past condescension into obnoxious, cynical bemusement. Each character—including the remote, unloving father (Albert Finney) and Hank’s shrewish ex-wife (Amy Ryan, repeating her Gone Baby Gone nag)—is a loser and a user. Masterson’s concept is like Andy watching himself rut—a peek at animalistic behavior that mistakes pornographic fascination for human truth.

Lumet doesn’t get that Masterson has written beneath the delirious moralizing of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network script and lacks the class consciousness of Jay Presson Allen’s script for Just Tell Me What You Want. That hard-edged New York comedy-of-manners had an old-fashioned sentimental core. Released soon after Manhattan, it couldn’t compete with Woody Allen’s fashionable narcissism, but it remains Lumet’s most underrated film—perhaps the truest to the kind of aggressive, hubristic New Yorker he’s knows best.

The hype that Lumet is a New York director par excellence, based on Dog Day Afternoon and his cop-movies Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan has passed into legend, thus into critical cant. But Before the Devil doesn’t have that brusque presentation of the city’s ethnic tensions. It moves from suburban drudgery to urban dehumanization—typified by Andy’s secret visits to a gay heroin dealer he uses as substitute mommy and shrink. These contrasts, via irritatingly awkward time-shifts from the jewelry store robbery to before, after and back to the scene of the crime, shuffle each male characters’ point-of-view. But there’s no narrative advantage except to show that Lumet envies the current Jean-Pierre Melville fad (only this movie is visually cruddy). Masterson misses his chance to make this existential trickery profound; he leaves out the women’s experiences/memories. Tomei’s Gina doesn’t redefine stupid golddigger and Rosemary Harris’ role as the mother feels curtailed—as if Masterson deliberately avoided challenging the benighted men’s mundane habits. Shifting beyond-the-grave might have been audacious, achieving something like Thornton Wilder’s cosmic omniscience.

But audacity isn’t in Lumet’s billfold. Besides, Before the Devil isn’t about transcendence. Lumet’s always-crude style matches the characters’ meanness and greed. When the plot devolves into blood and violence, extending the story to homicide, matricide, fratricide and spiritual patricide, it’s merely the cynical overkill Neil LaBute hasn’t yet dared. Before the Devil lacks tragic power. Its self-pitying characters lack sorrow. This reflects how actors live today. Hoffman and Hawke fall for Masterson’s canard that everyone is bad (“The world is an evil place!” Andy declares). But then, no one’s responsible for themselves or to others. These brothers are on the Westchester Limited, they can only be defined simplistically: as a mess and a dirtbag. The result is self-indulgent overacting—Hoffman’s specialty. His highpoint is Andy’s egregious complaint:

“It’s not fair!”

Before the Devil is too proudly depraved. It lacks the seriousness that scholar Robert Fitzgerald noted when calling Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex “the work of a mind in the highest degree orderly, penetrating and sensitive, an enlightened mind aware of the moral issues in human action and a reverent mind aware of the powers that operate through time and fortune on human affairs.” Lumet and Masterson continue the corruption of tragedy in the post-Sopranos age. They fail to attain the lucid, credible emotion of modern tragedy (on view in The Brave One and Reservation Road). Before the Devil is pathetic, a Hollywood tragedy.