p e n g u i n d e v i l

Certainly one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, I watched Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. A big meaty drama. One of those “things start off bad, and then just get worse and worse” kind of movies. Little (well, nothing) positive happens in this film and everyone ends up worse off then they were at the beginning. It is really quite good, with nothing but drama. The only light scenes at all are parts of the, yes, love scenes between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei right at the beginning, but aside from that, it’s all gloom and doom: Betrayal, lies, greed, murder, adultry… It’s all here. There were some annoying editing effects during the many jumps around in timeline but otherwise, I had no complaints with this great film. And it was a Sidney Lumet film…I didn’t even know he was still working. While he made some great classics in the 1960’s and 1970’s (The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network), he made The Wiz and I haven’t had much awareness of his work since. But this shows that he certainly still has it.

Another robbery gone wrong story, this has Albert Finney as Charles Hanson, a jewelry store owner whose wife is unconscious in intensive care due to botched armed robbery at their store. But that’s not the only reason that family events won’t be the same after this. His two sons Hank and Andy (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman) are both having money issues and looking for solutions.

While I didn’t really ever believe that they were brothers, they were both very good and quite convincing. Hank is an unconfident wreck, whose marriage and life have kind of fallen apart and he lives in a dumpy apartment and cannot afford to make his child support payments. But on the bright side, he is having an affair with his brother’s wife! That same brother Andy is living the good life, due to a good job and some nice embezzlement tricks he’s been pulling at work, some tricks that are starting to lose their magic. He also has a drug habit which, based on the apartment that his dealer lives in, must be costing him some good money.

Their solution is to pull an easy heist. Which, of course, goes oh, so terribly wrong. But that’s not all! No, not only do they have to deal with the failure of their heist and the problems that it didn’t solve, it brings more problems because Andy had come up with what seemed to be a perfect target… A small, mom and pop jewelry store that they both know everything about. They know it all because they both worked there in the past, because it is, of course, their mom and pop’s jewelry store!

After both their mother and the fellow who was hired to actually go in and rob the place are killed, drama besets them from all sides, and they make all sorts of wrong moves, leaving a trail of bloodshed behind them.