Movie City Indie

A lot of swoon-derful prose has been applied to this dark delight, a trim, fierce, modestly budgeted movie, shot on high definition video with multiple cameras, and man, it almost feels wrong to add to it. This is a wowser, a marvel and a gem. When Lumet's fortieth or so feature in a fifty-year career of terrible lows but tremendous highs, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, it was darker than a dark horse, it was a dark horse in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. And yet, at 83, Lumet (working from a script by first-time screenwriter and playwright Kelly Anderson) makes shards of time, charts double-crosses and breaks bones with all the alacrity of a much younger man.

I'd read a little about the story seeing the movie, yet was consistently surprised by the force and glee in every facet of the ever-tightening vise upon the characters. Some of the reversals are immediately apparent; any summary that makes sense will give far too much away. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play are brothers, Andy and Hank. They're both strung out and strung along by their bad habits and dirty secrets, and when Andy proposes the holdup of a simple family-owned jewelry store in Westchester, New York, things are set in motion.

We know within moments that a conflagration of epic proportions has taken place, more myth than mere melodrama. This is a heist-gone-wrong movie that may in fact surpass the substantial achievement of Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Leaping vertiginously across the narrative's intricate timeline, the effect offered by Lumet and Masterson functions as a bit of a stutter at each transition, moving slightly backward or slightly forward yet always, we remain in one place: present tension. Film unfolds in a persistent now, however we parse the story's intentions. Flopsweat has seldom been so entrancing.

Marisa Tomei plays Gina, Andy's wife, and the nakedness of these three performers, literally and emotionally, makes for a bravura show throughout. There are other performances to esteem in Tomei's career, such as Unhook the Stars, but anyone who sees Before the Devil… and says this woman is not a fine, forceful actress, is willfully blind or mean. Lumet is also aware of how the eye-poppingly beautiful Tomei provides contrast to the even-more-dowdy-than-usual Hoffman as well as champion scruff-bucket Hawke.

Lumet's name's been dropped a lot this year, even before this film's debut. Directors in conversation keep harking back to Lumet's command of performance and the unfussy, telling frame for his storytelling, and if they all take the lessons learned from Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon and Prince of the City, and now, Devil, we could see some tremendous movies in the next couple years. That is, if there's German financing and a European completion bond and hungry actors and great scripts and avid distributors like small, Canadian-owned thinkFILM… The factors of greatness are balanced against any and all films that go into production, but this savage, gleaming, brilliant little fucker reminds you why it's all worthwhile. [Ray Pride.]