The Devil Knows About These People

WARNING: Plot points revealed below–

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Don’t shoot heroin.

Don’t screw your brother’s wife.

Don’t steal from your parents.

If you do, make sure they won’t be there.

 

Don’t embezzle from your company.

Don’t squander your child support on cheap booze.

Don’t whine, especially if you’re a guy.

Pay some attention to the company you keep.

 

Have great sex in Rio, but remember it’s just vacation.

Don’t expect it to last forever.

Don’t kill your mother, your brother’s friend’s brother-in-law, or your heroin dealer when you get back.

 

Remember the IRS is watching.

Don’t pay former employees and pocket their checks.

Never trust your brother.

Watch out when your father has a pillow in his hands.

 

These are just a few of the lessons I learned watching Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, in which a shallow, fucked-up, heroin-and-cocaine addicated real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman) hatches a plot with his spectacularly dumb little brother (played to a T by Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents’ suburan jewelry store.

Why? Well, there are drugs to buy. Lots of them — dispensed by a gender-indeterminate waif in an apartment with modern furnishings and a view of the Empire State Building. Also, the accountant has a hot wife — Marisa Tomei, who spends a good half the movie topless and jiggling with a pertness that belies her age. Their last great sex was in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro and he’s got it in his head that all he needs to do in order to repeat the doggie-style feat of manliness is return.

The cypher, on the other hand, begins boffing his brother’s wife once everyone’s reassembled in New York — though what she sees in him is anyone’s guess. He also has a jaggedly bitchy ex-wife to serve and a spoiled daughter who wants to see The Lion King on Broadway, but tickets are $130 a pop.

Everyone needs money. No one seems to want to work.

This is not simply a dysfunctional family, it’s one in which blood flows like a rancorous, rotting, murderous stream. The mother is killed; her husband, the always fantastic Albert Finney, finds out. The brothers disintegrate in predictably biblical style. And justice is meted out: from the hands of the father, a punishment worthy of the crime.

Sidney Lumet has made some startling, wonderful, tense films in his time, and this one is no exception. It is, however, lacking the fundamental humanity of a movie like Dog Day Afternoon. The latest Lumet begins with an epigraph: "May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead." In the case of these people, however, I’m sure the devil won’t be fooled when they die. He’s been waiting.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is playing at the Edina Cinema.