Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Black as pitch in its humor, bleak in its view of humankind, this film is nonetheless highly entertaining. At the old master age of 83, Sidney Lumet is working the same street as Dog Day Afternoon thirty years ago, with hapless losers attempting a crime and watching it go so wrong. The very canny script by Kelly Masterson is adept at fracturing time sequence, repeating scenes from a different perspective, divulging the key event early and then flashing back and forward, masterfully sustaining psychological suspense and revealing the whole story bit by bit. Two brothers conspire to knock off a mom & pop jewelry store in a Westchester strip mall, but it all goes awry when their mom gets popped, and their pop is P.O.’ed. This is the House of Atreus in suburbia, as sleaze and incompetence compound into family tragedy. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the half-bright older brother, caught in his own web of deceit, and Ethan Hawke is the dim bulb younger brother, roped into the scheme but not up to the job. Both are strikingly portrayed, and Marisa Tomei is believably hot if not quite believable as the elder’s trophy wife, while Albert Finney is a tad over the top as the pair’s father. There are certainly no characters you would want to identify with, but there is a fascination to watching human bugs in a bottle, eating and being eaten. This film suffers, like No Country for Old Men, by its inability to come to any sort of redemptive resolution, but here the violence along the way is realistically chaotic and panicky, rather than heroic and fetishized. (2007, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-84.)