Family Values

Two brothers plot a robbery too close to home.

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

CHEAT THE PARENTS: Hoffman and Hawke botch the perfect crime. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Judging by his filmography over the last couple of decades, and the subsequent hit his reputation has taken, Sidney Lumet knows a thing or two about bad decisions — especially those that seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time. Whether or not the director found that kind of kinship with Kelly Masterson's script, he's created his most urgent work in recent memory, prompting cries of "comeback" up and down the festival circuit.

The film opens with its happiest scene, a bout of blissful sex between Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Gina (Marisa Tomei), a married couple enjoying a rare glimpse of happiness while on vacation. It's this moment, as Andy envisions dropping the couple's obviously miserable life in New York to start a new life, when the robbery plot that will prove his downfall is hatched, or at the very least when his mind is made up. It also ties together all of the film's thematic threads: the pressures of family, desire for escape and improbable, small-minded dreams.

When Andy approaches younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) with his scheme to rob their parents' jewelry store (the literal idea of the "mom and pop setup" wonderful in its illustration of the limited reach of Andy's imagination), it soon becomes evident that these otherwise very different siblings have both gotten themselves mired in situations from which they should be able to extricate themselves, but choose to hope for an easy out rather than take positive action. Andy's imagining of the robbery as a perfect and victimless crime evidences his refusal to admit the reality of his situation, both in its rose-tinted view of the scheme and in how short-term his planning is. But foresight, it soon becomes obvious, is not one of this family's strong suits.

Hawke is strong as the frightened younger brother, who knows better but follows others' leads down the wrong road throughout. There's a suggestion that even his affair with Gina is less a betrayal than yet another emulation of his older brother. Hoffman gives a rubbed-raw performance as an impossibly selfish man who overestimates his own intelligence at every opportunity and is constantly surprised and disgusted with himself when things fall apart. His breakdown scene, as he destroys the furniture in his apartment, takes place in slow motion, as if he's watching it from outside himself.

Beginning with the heist-gone-wrong and subsequently moving forward and backward in time, concentrating on one character in each segment, Lumet illuminates how each of these bad choices are made and how each impacts the other. Events don't unfold so much as they unravel; it all plays out with the pace and inevitability of a thread being pulled on a sweater.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Directed by Sidney Lumet

A ThinkFilm release