Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: A Review

This October 2007-released film, whose name is taken from the Irish toast, "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead," explores the vacuity, greed, and dysfunction of a New York family whose two adult sons are so strapped for cash that they devise a robbery of the parents' Westchester jewelry store to make some money. The idea behind the robbery is simple--the sons know the "layout" of the store, the robbery will take place on a Saturday (when neither parent is supposed to be around), no one will get hurt, the $600,000 or so worth of jewelry will be fenced to a willing buyer for about $120,000 and each of the brothers will make off with $60,000--an amount which will just about cover the older's coke habit and the younger's support and alimony payments to his ex-wife and child.

But we don't know any of this as we watch the film's first scene. For it begins just where modern biography tells its authors to begin the story of their subject's life: at a crucial turning point which gives a window into character. Thus, the film starts with a jewelry heist, where an older woman proprietor, while setting up for business, is interrupted and then threatened by an abusive, nervous masked man. She complies with his requests but while he is distracted she draws a gun and shoots the robber. He is badly wounded but shoots back, injuring the woman seriously. By the time the scene is over, the intruder lies dead and the woman is mortally wounded, but still breathing.

Telling the Story

Octogenarian director Sydney Lumet (born 1924) then tells the story "backwards" to a large degree, showing us in a series of short vignettes the events leading up to the bungled robbery. The primary characters we meet are the the two Hanson sons. The elder is Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a 40-something real-estate accounting executive with a six figure salary and chic office that belies his growing desperation in life. He is desperate for two reasons: (1) his marriage to Gina (Marisa Tomei) is on the rocks, and he corners himself into making extravagant promises ("we can move to Rio") to her to save the marriage; and (2) he has a nasty cocaine/heroin habit, one that he not only indulges in his office but in a pricey high-rise Manhattan apartment, where he is injected by an androgynous-looking guy who probably delivers other "services" to other clients. The younger son is Hank (Ethan Hawke), who gives the word "wimp" new meaning as he not only is humiliated by his carping ex-wife and young daughter but as we see him, later in the film, unable to stand in the line greeting visitors at his mother's funeral. His only recourse is to run--either to a small-time crook/acquaintance to pull off the robbery (Hank was supposed to do it himself) or to Gina, with whom he has been having a torrid affair.

Thus, both of the Hanson boys are in need of money. Andy, perhaps not the most stable of individuals, is the one who hatched the robbery scheme. He got Hank's buy-in before he revealed to Hank that it was the parents' jewely story that would be hit. He characterizes it to Hank as a most easy job. What could be simpler? You just take a toy gun, enter the store before opening hours, when the shopping center is empty, threaten the older lady who works for your parents on Saturday, take the $600,000 or so in jewelry, and then sell it. Andy, ever the efficient one, already lined up a buyer for the jewelry, a person who knows his father well and deals with fenced jewelry as part of an otherwise legitimate business. He also gives a "downpayment" of $2,000 in cash to Hank even before the robbery, money that Andy has swiped from his own company (he handles payroll).

We know that things aren't going to work out as planned (why would there be a movie, then?), and the robbery does indeed go terribly awry. Hank wimps out and doesn't have the heart to hold up the place, so he contracts it out to Bobby, a waiter of unsavory disposition, who brings a real gun to the hold-up. Hank is powerless to stop the course of things and Bobby, probably not the world's most skillful hold-up artist, manages to take his eyes off the proprietor (who happens to be the Hanson boys' mother--she was unexpectedly working that morning) long enough for her to shoot him. When Bobby's body comes hurling through the glass entry door (he had been shot a second time), a panicked Hank drives off in anguish and despair.

Finishing the Story

So, the brothers actually net nothing in jewelry from the robbery, but their mother has been fatally wounded. That loss is emblematic of the rest of the losses they will face as the not-so-cleverly devised scheme unravels quite quickly. Failure to remove personal items from a rental car (used in the robbery), leaving a personal business card with the jeweler who would buy the jewels at about 20 cents on the dollar, not having "hush money" to quell Bobby's distraught girlfriend and a guy she brought in to "protect" her interests--all these things make the "perfect crime" unravel like a ball of thread on a fast-moving loom. Before too long the brothers complicate their lives by engaging in further crimes, and the seemingly affable (from other movies) Philip Seymour Hoffman becomes a veritable killing machine as he desperately tries to right a vessel that is full of holes. The inevitable result is that the industrious father (played well by Albert Finney) figures out what has happened and eventually gets into the act in an unexpected way.

Conclusion

Sydney Lumet cut his teeth on "moral" movies in the 1950s through 1970s (Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Network), in which justice either prevailed or where moral themes were explored with skill. Yet in Devil he has replaced moral outrage with moral ambiguity. No one is very virtuous here, from the adulterous wife of Andy to papa Hanson to the two Hanson boys. The forces that move people are greed, lust and dependency. We certainly have a different view of human nature than the one which graced the screen on the "old Lumet" movies, but who can really say that this shift of focus in this movie represents a shift in his own thinking about humanity? If, indeed, it does, it would be consistent with the evolution of many people's thinking--away from righteous indignation to an acquiescence in a sordid and morally complex world. But the unintended result of this shift is probably a collective sigh of relief by the audience--at least my family is not this bad. Or so we can hope...

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