Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Rated: M
Palace Nova cinemas
Now screening


When the Academy of Motion Pictures hands out a Lifetime Achievement Award, it's usually for a completed body of work. When the octogenarian Sidney Lumet received the award three years ago for a distinguished career that included 'Twelve Angry Men'. 'Network', 'Dog Day Afternoon' and 'The Verdict', people assumed that he had retired. However, Lumet is still working, and if his latest thriller - 'Before The Devil Knows You're Dead' is any indication, there's plenty of life and art left in the old dog.

Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an ostensibly successful real-estate agent. However, Andy has been embezzling money from his employer to fund his heroin and cocaine habits. Little brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) is also struggling to pay child support and is in danger of losing his daughter. When Andy suggests that Hank rob his parents' (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) jewellery store while an elderly female staff member is on duty to solve their money problems (a victimless crime in Andy's words as his parents can claim the loss on their insurance), Hank agrees. However, when Hank takes along a trigger-happy accomplice and the boys' mother swaps shifts with the elderly staff member, the plan turns into a tragedy with Shakespearean dimensions.

Assisted by Kelly Masterson's fine screenplay that employs the disjointed narrative that is so popular in contemporary thrillers, Lumet's film is a sombre tale of a family torn asunder by the flaws of its individuals and structure. Indeed, the film is symbolic of the death of family itself, killed by greed and indifference. Both brothers are weak and Andy knows how to push Hank's buttons to get what he wants, but the problems are more complex. We learn that the boys' father was distant from Andy and had treated Hank like a baby. There's a sense that the sins of the sons are wrought from the DNA of the father. Hence, when the father begins to uncover the truth behind the robbery and administers his own justice, he does so with a disturbing lack of guilt or responsibility for his sons' destructiveness.

Hoffman is mesmerizing as Andy and Hawke gives him grand support. The scenes between the brothers where Andy's power over Hank are evident are the strongest parts of the film. Marisa Tomei gives her best performance since 'In The Bedroom' as Andy's hapless wife. Finney is a class act, but his character was not as well fleshed out as the sons.

It's been a watershed year for American cinema. Two of the three best films that I have seen in the past three months ('There Will Be Blood', 'No Country For Old Men') deal with the birth of contemporary greed and the end of social cohesion respectively. Now, we have a film that examines the destruction of family by greed. All three films are apt codas to the Bush era, but what's next?

Mal Byrne