Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

“You’ve got half an hour to get to heaven, before the devil knows you’re dead.” So begins the perfectly titled new film by legendary director Sidney Lumet. Told in fractured time, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a story of two monumentally broken brothers and a simple robbery gone very, very bad. Lumet fans—and Coen fans, for that matter—may find this initial setup a tad too familiar, but I assure you, this is nothing like Dog Day Afternoon or Fargo, though it certainly reaches the lofty heights of those crime classics.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Andy, a man who built his way to the top of the accounting department at a real estate firm, and ever since has been finding ways to tear himself back down. He’s in the midst of an IRS audit at work for all the money he’s been laundering, he’s got a drug habit so bad he’s snorting in his office, and his wife Gina (played with, um, naked honesty by Marisa Tomei) is having an affair on Thursdays with his brother. Andy is the kind of person who sees fit to dig himself out of his hole rather than climb out. Except, just as you can’t dig your way to China, digging your way out of trouble only finds you in a deeper hole.

Andy, needing money to get away from his myriad issues and head back to Rio with his wife—the only place where they were happy together—enlists his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to help solve both their problems. Hank is a sad-sack divorcee with months of child support to pay his bitter ex-wife, and a daughter he doesn’t want to disappoint. He agrees to do this job with Andy even though neither of them have ever attempted anything like this before. Andy is convincing though: he says it will be easy. The place is familiar, safe and insured. “A victimless crime.” Andy will only reveal the location after Hank agrees to do so, for good reason. When he does, Hank is incredulous and defiant. But money makes people do terrible things, and Hank agrees to the job.

Kelly Masterson’s screenplay mashes up time and perspective—we see, for example the heist from three different points of view, at different stages in the film. With each churn back and forth in time, a new character motivation is revealed, making the entire sequence of events that follows the botched heist that much more tragic.

In a drama that’s probably more about family than it is about crime, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is not just a story of Hank and Andy’s troubles. Rich characters surround them, like Tomei’s Gina, who tells her husband she’s having an affair not to get it off her conscience, but to see if it will make him feel something, anything, for her again. Equally strong is Albert Finney as the patriarch of the Mason family, whose heartbreaking performance not only grounds the movie but gives insight into how two seemingly normal people like Hank and Andy could so easily get mixed up in such a sordid mess.

The final half hour of this film is one shocking turn after another that I’d rather not spoil. The harrowing conclusion, though, is the high point of the superb acting by the oft-underrated Hawke and the now-celebrated Hoffman. Hoffman, in particular, combines two of his better personas—the sad, quiet schlub and the manic, cold-hearted villain—into something we’ve not quite seen before. The desperation of Hank and Andy is palpable, and we can hardly bear to watch what they do to fix their mistakes. Yet, in the end, we feel for them all the same. A