Lumet Returns With Two Angry Men

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The New York Sun

It’s been quite a while since Sidney Lumet, the director of such classics as “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” made an appearance at the New York Film Festival. To be exact, it’s been 43 years, when he was there to present 1963’s “Fail-Safe,” since he last took center stage at Lincoln Center.

But the Philadelphia native, who’s been nominated for four Best Director Oscars, is back this year with “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” (showing October 12 & 13), a work so crisply contemporary that it’s difficult to conceive it was crafted by an 83-year-old who shows no signs of slowing down. “Devil,” which stars an ominous Philip Seymour Hoffman and an impressive Ethan Hawke, tells the story of a botched jewelry heist from the perspectives of four family members, jumping among days and points of view as the sordid scheme unravels in disastrous fashion.

Mr. Lumet said he has been reassured by the strong reactions the film has provoked during its early festival screenings.

“It just arrived in the mail,” he said. “It was a hell of a story, that’s all I knew, brilliantly plotted relationships. And it’s been a surprise. This project came from nowhere, the reaction has been extraordinary … Lumet’s first law: A hit is better than a flop.”

What stunned the audience at the festival screening, however, was Mr. Lumet’s stumble as he referred to the writer of that script which so captured his imagination. Mentioning Kelly Masterson, a first-time screenwriter, he alternated between pronouns, debating with a member of the press as to whether it was a “he” or “she” (Mr. Masterson is a he, for the record).

“I’ve never met the person,” Mr. Lumet said, explaining that he had taken the original story about close friends and structured with complicated jumps in a timeline, and rewritten the work as he saw fit. Instead of good friends, he made the criminals brothers — something that became a crucial element of the film, given the way the idea of blood relation is used in the final version — and he more clearly outlined the time shifts, pivoting around the day of that botched robbery, so that audiences can more easily follow the jumps into the future and the past.

Hardly known for his writing (the Internet Movie Database lists only four writing credits in his career, compared with 67 directing credits), Mr. Lumet’s prominent tweaking of the script for “Devil” is only the first of many surprises for his fans. Long known for using New York City as a backdrop for his films, “Devil” sets many of its key scenes in Westchester, with Mr. Lumet cutting between the chaos of back-alley city bars and the deceptive calm of the suburbs. The robbery itself takes place not at a Federal Reserve or diamond exchange, but at a bland suburban strip mall.

After filming “Devil” with all-digital equipment, Mr. Lumet used the occasion of his festival appearance to champion the industry’s evolution to a new, “inevitable” way of thinking digitally. “Film is a pain in the a–, cumbersome, you’re constantly at the mercy of not just the cameraman but at the mercy of the lab. John Schlesinger told me that with ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ he went through 16 master prints before he ever got one that satisfied him,” he said, explaining the process by which the film negative is converted into a viable print. “On a picture like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ I was going crazy because the first obligation of that movie was to say, ‘Hey folks, this really happened.’ But as you know, when you shoot the sky on film, the blue of the sky is never the same blue that your eye sees.”

Instead, he said, with high definition, it is possible to capture that naturalistic look and feel, and to take more control over the film’s final texture.

* * *

Much like Mr. Lumet’s latest, experimentation with standard structure is central to Gus Van Sant’s latest, “Paranoid Park” (showing October 8 and 9), an adaptation of Blake Nelson’s novel about a confused teenage skateboarder who inadvertently commits a crime and struggles to cope with the reality that he may never be caught.

Reached on the phone in Portland, Ore., Mr. Van Sant said he approached Mr. Nelson’s text less with the intent to reconstruct the story than to reshuffle its structure.

“I didn’t necessarily favor one story over another, but I was interested in trying for a different order,” he said, pointing to the story’s various subplots, from the crime itself to the teenager’s love life, his family life, and his obsession with skateboarding. “There’s always been a convention of telling and retelling a story from different angles, and that probably reached a zenith with ‘Citizen Kane,’ and while in that case it was an investigative reporter getting different stories from different characters, what I’m doing is much the same, going over the same period of time from different perspectives. But that’s how it happens — information and the way we experience things happen out of order in stories because lots of times the storyteller will start with the most exciting thing and then jump back to the beginning.”

During the movie’s teetering highs and lows, as this teenager sinks deeper into an emotional nightmare, what comes through loud and clear is a mind-bending sound design. In one scene, as the crime itself is finally shown during one telling of the day’s events, an ethereal portion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony soars above the action; in another, as the teen takes a shower and struggles to cope with what’s just occurred, a symphonic explosion of sounds roars from the screen, mixing music with jungle noises and sound effects.

“I was really playing it by ear as we were constructing the soundtrack,” Mr. Van Sant said. “We were actually doing it off iTunes, which was installed on the same machine we were using for editing. There’s a lot of works that were composed without instruments, and those pieces are sort of adding to the intensity of sound design, of the wide range of music that’s used here.”

Set to appear in person when the film screens for the public next week, Mr. Van Sant, much like Mr. Lumet, said he’s been surprised by the reactions he has already witnessed at the Toronto Film Festival. As these two works arrive for the New York Film Festival’s final week, they form a noteworthy one-two punch of established directors trying their hand at something new.

ssnyder@nysun.com


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