Beyond the Multiplex

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke lead the outstanding cast of the overheated "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Plus: Jimmy Carter charms. Anthony Hopkins confounds.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, David Lynch, Jimmy Carter, Anthony Hopkins, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Documentaries, Independent Film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Reviews, Ethan Hawke, Beyond the Multiplex

Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."

Oct. 25, 2007 | "I don't add up. I am not the sum of my parts," muses the corpulent, corrupt businessman as he kicks back -- which in his case means sprawling on the sofa in the apartment of a mean-spirited transvestite who has shot him up with heroin. This self-reflective fellow, slick as frozen snot and guilty of planning a horribly bungled crime, is Andy, the antihero played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Sidney Lumet's film "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," but his self-diagnosis can serve as our mantra in this week's survey of independent film.

Alongside Lumet's overheated New York crime melodrama, which itself doesn't quite add up, we have documentary portraits of two elusive, gifted, generous and peculiar public figures. That's about the best I can do in making Jimmy Carter and David Lynch seem similar in any way, except to add that each is the subject of a partly revealing, partly hagiographic and fascinating film. Jonathan Demme's Carter documentary is a textured study of a complicated figure in motion, and a mesmerizing glance inside the media-publicity machine. (Not to mention that for all his failures as a politician, Jimmy Carter is a genuine hero of our time.) The subject of "Lynch" is every bit as intriguing, but the film itself is too piecemeal and worshipful to reach beyond a core fan base.

Speaking of peculiar public figures in the latter stages of an illustrious career, Anthony Hopkins has directed a movie. At least, I guess it's a movie: It's around the right length, I watched it as images projected on a screen and I seem to recall actors speaking dialogue in it, at least occasionally. As to what else to say about Hopkins' hallucinatory "Slipstream" -- does it actually exist or did I imagine it? Is Hopkins batshit-crazy, or am I? -- I can only express bafflement.

Utterly unrelated to all of the above comes English director Simon Rumley's wrenching and claustrophobic "The Living and the Dead," a combination of the crumbling-old-house and protagonist-gone-mad genres that utterly lacks ghosts or monsters but might be an indie-horror classic of the future. Dammit, I'm just going to keep beating the drum for these low-budget horror flicks until the rotting zombies rip it from my hands! Also opening this week, but uncovered here: "Saw IV," in which Machiavellian torture-meister Jigsaw is dead but still appears in the film, or whatever; Ron Livingston and Melissa George in the disability-themed drama "Music Within"; Eduardo Verástegui and Tammy Blanchard as passing Manhattan strangers, à la "Once," in "Bella"; the Spanish family drama "Dark Blue Almost Black; and "Mr. Untouchable," an acclaimed doc about legendary Harlem godfather Nicky Barnes (not exactly the character Denzel Washington plays in Ridley Scott's forthcoming "American Gangster," but same general idea).

Also, a little shameless pluggery: Have you been watching the TV version of "Beyond the Multiplex," a little series of two- to three-minute interstitials starring yours truly, Stephanie Zacharek and IFC's adorable Matt Singer that's been running on IFC and Salon? Why, of course you have.

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead": Crooked men going in straight lines
With a dynamite cast, a fatalistic crime-thriller plot that dabbles in Greek tragedy and the book of Genesis, and a venerable Hollywood legend at the helm, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is one of the season's most eagerly anticipated films. Or so I'm told. Here's what 83-year-old Sidney Lumet's 45th feature film (by my approximate count) actually is: a Rorschach test for filmgoers. What you see in it says more about you than it says about Lumet and his straightforward, throwback-style entertainment, which is richly played and dazzlingly blinged up with sex and drugs, but virtually devoid of human insight or narrative ambition.

Kelly Masterson's script artfully unfolds its dire fable of two brothers in need of cash, debauched New York real-estate broker Andy (Hoffman) and his deadbeat sibling Hank (Ethan Hawke), whose scheme to commit the perfect crime -- by ripping off their own family's suburban jewelry store -- goes stupidly and gruesomely awry. The film's momentum largely depends on its Tarantino-style hopscotching through time and space: We see Hank and his low-life Brooklyn buddy Bobby (a nice performance, in a caricature role, by Brian F. O'Byrne) botch the heist -- then we fly backward a few days, to find out how Andy and Hank hatched this crackpot idea to begin with.

Lumet frequently shows us the same scene in different ways from different characters' perspectives, so we see the robbery and subsequent disaster first from the perspective of a jewelry-store employee who arrives to open the store, and then, much later, from Hank's as he waits for Bobby in the car and realizes it's all gone wrong. (We only get the opening scene once, and that's OK, since it involves Hoffman and Marisa Tomei going at it butt-naked, with vigorous sound effects, in a Rio hotel room.) There's no question that we understand the story better each time through, even if a lot of what we learn are just the details of this family's depravity: Andy's doing massive amounts of drugs, largely on the sofa of the aforementioned transvestite, and embezzling money from his company; Hank owes a ton of child support to his bitchy ex-wife; Andy's wife, Gina (Tomei), makes weekly afternoon-delight visits to Hank's apartment. (Lumet spares no opportunity to display Tomei in her lacy underthings, or less than that.)

This cut-up storytelling feels energetic, for a while, and the moment-to-moment acting by Lumet's outstanding ensemble -- also featuring Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris as Andy and Hank's parents -- is so strong that you might not notice the film starting to wheeze and creak, like an old steam engine started up for the tourists. In almost every scene, Hoffman gives you something, a weird little Cheshire-cat smile, or the way Andy obsessively pats his pockets, that suggests the character's deep reservoir of misanthropy and self-hatred. I'm not a huge fan of Hawke's sincere, hangdog act, but even though Hank is an incompetent coward, he gives the viewer someone to latch onto who's not wholly repulsive. And my favorite acting moment in the movie is a bit of irrelevant business, when Tomei's Gina, as she's trying to leave Andy, wiggles her suitcases girlishly to the door, clearly astonished that he's not helping her.

I can only presume that many viewers will like "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" because it relies, beneath its bells and whistles, its mainlining and nudity and transgender hookers, on old-school, point-to-point storytelling drawn from Lumet's apprentice years in 1950s television. If you dislike the so-called ironic tone of much independent film, or the arch dialogue and moral murk of 21st-century TV drama, I can assure you that this movie's artificial universe is nothing like those. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" sometimes feels like acting class: Every character in every scene is going in a straight line, from his motivation to his objective, and crashing into another character's straight line along the way. Andy wants to lure Hank into his moronic scheme, and Hank has a Pavlovian response to money. Hank's ex-wife wants her goddamn money; Hank just wants a little goddamn human understanding (since he has no money). Charles (Finney's patriarch) wants some goddamn justice for the horror inflicted on his family, but nobody on the goddamn police force works for a living anymore, goddamn it.

It's one thing to say you want to channel the fatalistic force of Euripidean and Sophoclean tragedy, or the primordial tale of Cain and Abel, into a contemporary crime drama. It's quite another thing to pull it off. For me at least, the evident strengths and laudable intentions of "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue." In an era that's brought us the dense dialogue and ambiguous characterizations of "The Wire" and "The Sopranos," this movie (like almost all Lumet films, truth be told) has the subtlety and moral complexity of a demolition derby. By the time the final scene arrived -- in which someone commits yet another terrible crime, to finalize this family's self-immolation -- I just didn't want to hear those crashing sounds anymore.

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" opens Oct. 26 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.

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