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Before the Devil Knows You´re Dead
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NRY
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Genre:
Cinema
Drama
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Year:
2007
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Director:
Sidney Lumet
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Actors:
Albert Finney, Aleksa Palladino, Amy Ryan, Arija Bareikis, Blaine Horton, Brian F O'Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Leonardo Cimino, Marisa Tomei, Michael Shannon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosemary Harris
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Written by:
Kelly Masterson
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Runtime:
116 minutes
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Classification:
18 años
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Country:
USA
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Language:
English
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Sinopsis:
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Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet directs this absorbing suspense thriller about a family facing the worst enemy of all: itself. The movie begins with a couple having vigorous sex while vacationing in Rio.They are Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Andy, and luscious Marisa Tomea playing his wife Gina. "I'd love to live like this," she says. Their subsequent dialog leads us to suspect good sex doesn't happen often for them.
Lumet pieces the early sequences together with a Tarentino flashback style going back and forth to and from a robbery in a suburban mall, each time giving us more crucial backstory. Day 1: The elderly woman behind the counter of the jewelry store, the target of the crime, pulls a gun from a drawer as the confident masked gunman strips the jewelry displays. She fires and fatally wounds the man, but not before he returns fire. Neither survives. A getaway driver, horrified, flees.
The next caption, 3 Days Before the Robbery, sets up the foundation. As two brothers, Andy (Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) watch a young girls little league baseball game, first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson shrewdly implies money poses a problem for both men--each secretly hopes the other will pay for the franks and beer. Hank, divorced, but still sharing a house with his ex, hasn't met his child support payments for months. To compound his problem, Hank also insists his daughter attend a ritzy private school.
Andy mocks Hank as they share a table at a bar, demeaning him as a fag. He has a plan to solve Hanks financial problems: "Lets do a robbery." When Hank demurs, Andy bullies him some more, "when will you grow up?" Not surprisingly, Hank changes course. The plan is to steal and fence the jewelry from their parents' jewelry store. That's the great advantage: they know the ins and outs, where the alarms are, where the drawer containing the keys to open the glass displays is. On Saturdays, an elderly employee opens up; she won't have any reason to fight off an armed thief. At any rate Hank will use a toy gun. No one gets hurt and the only victim is the insurance company.
Hank, appalled, wants out but feels somehow obligated. Hank is timid, and in awe of his smarter and wealthier brother. Andy claims Hank must do the actual crime as Andy was recently at the mall and would be quickly recognized. Hank never spots the flaw in this story, that the woman at the register would easily identify either brother. Both men work for a real estate firm, Andy is the payroll manager, Hank some sort of underling. Hank takes a long lunch to rendezvous with none other than Andy's wife, whom he professes to love. She makes no such commitment to him.
Andy, it turns out, needs money for more than vacations to Rio. He is embezzling the firm to feed his cocaine habit, and with an IRS audit set for next Monday, he must acquire quick cash to replace what he stole. Andy figures the theft would net a fast $60,000 apiece.
Hank recruits a bartender, Bobby, whom he also owes money to, as his partner and to be the getaway driver. But Bobby, seeing how green Hank is at this, takes over using a real gun. As we already know, the robbery is botched, but we now learn that it was their mother who opened the store that morning.
Upon learning who the victim was, Andy cries. "If we had to take someone out, why couldnt it be him," referring to his father. Here Lumet introduces one of his great thematic concerns: how children inadvertently or deliberately become burdened by the aspirations of their parents. The wounds caused by family dysfunctions leave permanent scars for Lumet's protagonists.
Complications make the stakes higher as the brother of Bobby's girl friend demands a $10,000 settlement to keep quiet about what his sister knows. Next, Albert Finney as the family patriarch, cannot accept that a low life from Red Hook, Brooklyn, would travel all the way to Westchester to commit a robbery unless someone put him up to it. Since the police believe the case is closed, he begins his own investigation. He pursues justice at all costs, completely unaware that the culprits he is hunting are his own two sons.
At their mothers wake, Charles (Finney) acknowledges the great failure of his life, his harsh, unforgiving, excluding attitude towards Andy. He apologizes, but Andy, who could never understand or countenance his father's doting on his wimp of a younger brother, will have none of it (Probably he should check in with his wife on the matter. She certainly found qualities in Hank missing in her liar of a husband.). His rage and resentment palpable, Hank explains how it feels to be the one member of the family who his parents feel does not belong. He tells Charles their rejection makes him wonder if Charles is really his father, a remark for which Charles slaps him in the face. Hoffman, despicable before this scene, obviously remains so at its conclusion. But in our learning what makes him so vicious, we also understand the depths of his pain.
Meanwhile Gina admits to Andy that she's leaving him and that she' s been involved with his brother. Gina's hesitant look makes it appear she is pleading for Andy to beg her to stay, but Andy, blinded now by still another family betrayal, lets her go. With the walls ready to tumble on the brothers, Lumet has set the viewer up for a tumultuous grand guignol and a tragic dénouement.
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