Stars Shine, Narrative Fails: Lumet Doesn't Quite Deliver
Written: Jan 24 '08 (Updated Jan 25 '08)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Superb acting by an all-star cast, and an intriguing if depressing and grotesque premise.
Cons: The acting and the premise cannot save the film from its lack of focus.
The Bottom Line: Take happy pills so you don't try and commit suicide during the movie, and not just because of its subject matter. The acting shines, but the execution is a mess.
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| NFP's Full Review: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead |
Director Sidney Lumet's highly-anticipated return in the criminal suspense psychodrama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has engendered critical raves that seem to this reviewer to speak more to wishful thinking and his reputation than to what's actually on the screen.
Lumet's pedigree is beyond reproach -- masterpieces like Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, Prince of the City and The Verdict spring to mind. But those powerful films date back to Lumet's prime in the 70s and early 80s. It's almost as if one can taste the critics' desire that his latest effort be on par.
It isn't.
The undeniable fact that an all-star cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei and Rosemary Harris shine in their grotesque roles cannot shake the film's unremittingly depressing premise from regularly bogging down its narrative flow to its ultimate detriment.
You want strong acting performances? See this film. You want a movie that holds together from beginning to finish? Go see something else.
THE FILM:
The screenplay by Kelly Masterson follows a family's self-destruction in flashback style around a criminal caper gone horribly awry.
Hoffman plays Andy Hanson, a Manhattan penthouse stock broker deeply in debt due to his hard drug addictions, and unable to satisfy the sexual needs of his stunningly luscious wife Gina (a sensual Tomei whose sculpted 43-year-old body and come-hither looks will drive every 40- and 50-something male in the audience to utter drooling distraction in the sex scenes).
For his part, Andy's divorced younger brother Hank (Hawke) lives in a tenement basement apartment, is barely scraping by in a series of part-time jobs, and is consistently behind on his alimony and child support payments.
They both need money, and fast. Andy enlists a reluctant Hank in a hair-brained scheme involving a strip mall retail jewelry business run by their parents Charles (Finney) and Nanette (Harris).
Needless to say, the supposedly victimless "piece of cake" scheme goes horribly and tragically wrong in large part due to Hank's Keystone Kops ineptitude and personal insecurity. The balance of the movie peels back the dark side of every member of the family, including the father, Charles, as Andy and Hank work to cover up their botched plan, and the rest of the family and the police try to figure out who was behind it.
WHAT WORKS:
The acting, and the premise. First, the acting.
Hoffman, Hawke, Tomei, Finney and Harris are totally convincing in their roles, expertly balancing desperation, greed, regret, anger, fear, and the mix of love and hate that lies at the heart of any completely dysfunctional family as it unravels. These are consummate actors delivering what their director and the screenwriter require of them.
As to the premise, Lumet and Masterson deserve credit for creating so disgustingly appealing a yarn to demonstrate a family's self-destruction. There is not a redeeming or attractive personality among any of them save Harris's Nanette.
WHAT DOESN'T:
Once the scheme comes apart in graphically bloody fashion, so does the movie. Lumet and Masterson careen seemingly without cohesion among several simultaneous "relationship" threads, each more unpleasant than the next: Andy and his androgynous drug supplier, Hank and his bitter ex-wife and embarrassed child, Andy and Gina's ruinous interactions, Hank's rather ambiguous connection to a loser friend and his horrid wife and their child, Charles' feelings about his sons and his frustration and anger at the NYPD and at himself and Nanette, and ultimately the tenuous connection between Andy and Hank.
Lumet's plate is so full of large portions of engrossing bad taste that he seems unable or unwilling to dole it out in digestible portions that support a narrative with a meaningful purpose and a payoff. What the audience is left with is a beautifully-presented groaning board of unsavory food that ultimately just sits on the table, only picked-at and spoiling.
Lumet has been too good a director in the past to be allowed to get away with this.
IN SUM:
By the time we find out who pays back whom for what, we don't care. Appreciation for very fine acting craft will only go so far when the vehicle careens so out of control that we actually pray for a car crash...and then when we get it, we still find it anticlimactic.
Three stars only because the acting is so fine.
Recommended:
No
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NFP
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Location: Washington, DC
Reviews written: 129
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Settled in DC and content. Starting up again...slowly.
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