Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Capitol Films, Funky Buddha Productions, Unity Productions, Image Entertainment, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I eventually watched a movie last night from the DVD backlog, something I’d wanted to see for a while but had avoided because it seemed too gloomy. It was Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and because it took its title from an old Irish toast (“May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for your head; may you be 40 years in heaven, before the devil knows you’re dead” — though the version shown during the opening credits cut your time in heaven from 40 years to just half an hour) and the funding for the film came from Irish sources, I had assumed the film was set in Ireland and would be a rambunctious tale of Irish street criminals running wild until the Irish police finally caught up with them and/or they killed each other. No such luck: directed by the late Sidney Lumet (who made it in 2007 and died four years later) and starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (who died in 2014 from an overdose of cocaine and heroin — he’d been “clean” for 23 years but had relapsed and, like a lot of other junkies who quit long-term and then resume use, he didn’t realize his body no longer had the tolerance for the high doses he’d once taken), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead deals with two brothers, Andy (Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), who have fairly well-paid jobs — we don’t learn what Hank does but Andy is a payroll accountant for a real-estate company — but they’re also desperately broke. Andy is broke because he’s a heavy-duty cocaine and heroin user — there’s one grimly funny scene in which he has to conceal the residue from the line of coke he just did in his office when his supervisor comes in to summon him to a meeting — and he’s been embezzling from the company for his drug money. Now the company is about to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service and so Andy needs a quick score to replace the money he’s stolen from his company. Hank needs money because he’s way behind on his alimony and child support from his previous marriage and the daughter he had with his wife before they split, who whines when dad can’t scrape up the $130 for her private school’s field trip to see The Lion King on stage.

The movie opens with a quite graphic sex scene between Andy and his wife Gina (Marisa Tomei), in which it looks like he’s butt-fucking her and then they relax in a post-coital glow — only they soon tell each other and us that the only reason they could perform is they were in Rio and they have no sex life with each other at home. Andy hits on the idea of staging a robbery at the jewelry store their parents Charlie (Albert Finney) and Nannette (Rosemary Harris) own in Westchester (that’s right, folks: this film takes place in and around Lumet’s favorite setting, New York City). Andy figures that since his parents are insured, the robbery won’t cost them anything; it’s true they’ll have to fence the stolen items with their father’s old friend William (Leonardo Cimino, whose last film this was; he was 91 when he made it, and looks it) and will receive only $60,000 from the swag, but split two ways that’ll be enough for Hank to catch up with his alimony and child support and Andy to replace the money he stole from his company to buy drugs. Only instead of doing the actual stickup himself and using a toy gun, Hank subcontracts the robbery to a criminal friend named Bobby Lasorda (Brían F. O’Byrne) — I wonder if screenwriter Kelly Masterson named him after former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda? — who commits it with a real gun and ends up in a shoot-out with Nannette Hanson that kills both of them. Things snowball out of hand as Andy and Hank have to do the usual rounds of institutionalized mourning and their dad starts following people around to see if he can find out who killed his wife. Midway through the movie Bobby Lasorda’s brother-in-law Dex (the quite hot Michael Shannon — with the plethora of Irish-sounding names in the lower reaches of the cast you can see why I thought it was set in Ireland!) tells Hank that his sister Chris, Bobby’s widow, needs $10,000 immediately to raise their kid or he’ll report Hank and Andy to the police. Eventually [spoiler alert![ Andy decides to get the money by robbing and killing his drug dealer — only, since his fiancée Chris (is there, he has to kill her too and he threatens to kill Hank. But to do that Andy has to turn his head from Chris and she shoots him. The finale takes place in the hospital where Andy is being treated (and where his mom was treated after she was almost killed and lingered on for a few days until daddy pulled the plug), only dad has found Andy’s business card in the old fence’s office and realized his oldest son masterminded the holdup in the first place and therefore he and his brother are the real robbers — and dad crashes the hospital room, cuts off Andy’s oxygen supply and ultimately smothers him with a pillow.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a quite good movie but not an especially pleasant one, and because Lumet and Masterson were more interested in character than action or suspense it’s surprisingly dull for a film about crime — though in some ways that very dullness makes the point that Andy and Hank are two ordinary guys pathetically out of their depth in the criminal underworld. Masterson gave the script a non-linear structure but helpfully provided enough chyrons we’re kept aware throughout of when we are. Future record producer Walter Legge wrote in 1933, “There is in the last works of nearly every great artist a strangely luminous quality, as if the creative mind had already seen the world beyond death and were conscious of things infinitely greater than the emotional experiences of this world.” He was thinking of works like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s last string quartets, Brahms’ Four Serious Songs (which are actually about death) and Wagner’s Parsifal — all works of nobility and uplift, though with their dark moments — and I don’t think Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was the sort of thing he had in mind but it does have a singularly elegiac quality that makes it appropriate as a major director’s final film. It’s also beautifully acted, especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney; Hoffman practically delivers a master class in how a great actor can take a thoroughly repulsive character and give him elements of pathos and suffering so the audience understands him even if we don’t particularly like him — and Finney, playing by far the most sympathetic of the major characters, makes us believe in his deus ex machina turn as his son’s killer at the end. I remember when Philip Seymour Hoffman died I looked at his list of credits in the Los Angeles Times obituary and thought, “Damn! Half my favorite movies of the last 15 years had him in them!” He’s still a talent who’s very much missed, and I can only curse the drug culture and the siren-like lure it had for him for taking him away from us way too soon.