Devil's in the Details

Sidney Lumet turned 83 in June, but you'd never know it from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

by Sam Adams

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Sidney Lumet turned 83 in June, but you'd never know it from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers whose hapless attempt at a jewelry-story robbery leads to a string of tragedies, the movie is enthusiastically scuzzy, positively wallowing in moral murk.

Shot in high-definition video, Before the Devil is purposefully nondescript, shunning HD's default shine for Stygian gloom. Apart from one glamorous apartment where Hoffman goes to escape his dead-end job and disintegrating marriage, Lumet intended that "nothing else should you even notice. I wanted pretty much everything else to disappear."

If anything in Before the Devil shows Lumet's half-century of experience, it's the actors, who have a raggedy liveliness rarely seen since Lumet's 1970s heyday. People often assume, Lumet says, that the lifelike spontaneity of the performances must come out of improvisation, but he demurs. "Unless you are cast identically to the character you are playing, you can't trust the improvisatory thing," he says. "The first reaction has always got to be suspect."

Even the scene in which Hoffman unloads a lifetime worth of familial hurt and resentment in a single red-faced monologue was extensively rehearsed beforehand, although many directors would fear losing the freshness of the first read-through. "People think that something like that, you don't rehearse, you just let it happen," Lumet says. "But the fact that he had done it before gave him the confidence to know that it was going to happen again, and that he needn't worry about the result."

Lumet spent two weeks rehearsing the cast, and only toward the end did he think about how to shoot what they'd developed. "I want it to grow organically out of what the actors are doing," he says. "I would never want to stage a scene for the camera."

Although many of Lumet's best movies are concerned with characters on the wrong side of the law, Lumet says he has no interest in the subject of crime per se. In fact, he views Before the Devil not as a modern noir, but as a melodrama, a genre he feels has gotten a bad rap. "It's fallen into disrepute, which is really kind of silly," he says. "Hamlet's a pretty good melodrama. Oedipus Rex, when he comes in with his eyes torn out — that's not bad. People talk about it disrespectfully, but I love it."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens Friday at Ritz Five. See Shaun Brady's review on p. 68.