Tangled Blood
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The title printed on the ticket stub is only half the tale: “May you be in heaven half an hour,” the title card says, “before the devil knows you’re dead.” And my how the gods have it in for Andy. Played with a blistering intensity by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who rips a thousand different shades into his character’s deceptive, calculated monotone, Andy is the driving force of this desperate story, the one who finally becomes fed up with eeking through his life and who decides that he needs more — by any means necessary.
Everywhere Andy turns, the spoils of a happy life are mocking. Sidney Lumet’s new film, which makes its premiere this weekend at the 45th New York Film Festival, prefaces its visions of hell with a momentary stop in heaven: a prologue consisting of a lusty sex scene, with Andy and his wife (Marisa Tomei) reaching for the heavens as they vacation in South America. Andy laughs, giggles really, asking how this happening: “We’re supposed to be an old married he couple,” he says to the sighing, smiling woman on his shoulder. Yet this is the only hint of sex Andy will enjoy throughout the film, the only happy moment of this marriage on display, and the only time we will see Andy smile, outside of his uncanny ability to don a spinster’s sneer as he sells his brother on taking part in an unfathomable criminal escapade.
But we mustn’t dive too deep into this murky puddle of a potboiler without first calling attention to the intricate shape, and shading, imparted by Mr. Lumet. He begins the story at the precise moment of the movie’s central jewelry heist, as a masked, armed plunderer faces off against an elderly employee behind the counter, and three rapid gunshots prove life-changing for all involved. As Mr. Lumet jumps back and forth in time, from a few days before the heist to a few days after, from Andy’s perspective, and then from Hank’s (Ethan Hawke), we start to recognize the truly shocking nature of the crime, and the way best-laid plans give way to worst possible scenarios. Even as we watch the ship go down in flames, Mr. Lumet places us back in the midst of those giddy pre-robbery discussions, the future informing the past, and the past informing the future.
In the aftermath, we come to see the intent more clearly: Andy is desperate to afford the refined life he has been impersonating all these years — the suits he wears, the condo he owns, the drugs he does — and Hank is drowning in a sea of alimony payments and monthly bills. They both need cash, and Andy, who has recently dumped cocaine for heroin and who, as a payroll manager, pilfers his company’s petty cash fund, has devised a fool-proof plan that addresses not only a load of financial debt, but also some emotional debt going back to the brothers’ parents and their childhood. Looping in his outwardly desperate baby brother, Andy lays out the target: Mom and dad’s jewelry store in Westchester. And he rolls out the rationale with absolute conviction: Their folks’ insurance will cover the lost goods, and the kids will get a decent cut of loot.
It’s a win-win, until, of course, it becomes a lose-lose. Working forward, even as he works backward, Mr. Lumet piles emotional trauma upon emotional trauma. Andy’s marriage is disintegrating, Hank’s sloppy decisions prove fatal, and the two brothers increasingly turn on each other.
The 84-year-old director proves to have a tougher stomach here than some might imagine after such softer recent works as “Find Me Guilty” and “Gloria,” and a bigger appetite for existential despair that, in the film’s later segments, makes the conventional denouement of a tragedy seem more inspired. As the complications pile up, we watch these two men shift into survival mode, and again we come back to Andy as he sizes up his long odds, searching for some scheme that will make this all alright. Yet as Andy’s money problems become compounded by legal worries, unethical business practices, the unearthing of emotional scars too sordid to be confronted, and a losing battle with impotence, Mr. Hoffman embodies a character who is rapidly accepting the realization that he may have reached a point of no return.
Not just Mr. Lumet’s best work in some time, but one of this year’s most intricate and satisfying pop entertainments, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” is more a first-rate character study than a straight-laced thriller. The story arc strikes more dramatic gold in the days before the robbery than it does amid the events of the big day. In both Andy’s suppressed rage and Hank’s harried state of panic, we learn how they adapt under pressure.
For this, credit is due Mr. Lumet for installing the thrills not in the crime at the center of this caper but in the motivations for it. The heist is not the end of the story but the beginning, the spark that has set the pile of timbers ablaze and shed light on the shrouded demons that unleash the worst in people.
ssnyder@nysun.com