Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Directed by Sidney Lumet
B+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Nov. 2

Happily disproving the theory that most folks mellow with age, the 83-year-old Sidney Lumet has just celebrated his 50th anniversary in the movie biz (12 Angry Men came out in 1957) by unleashing his nastiest, most fatalistic thriller yet.

It's good to be Sidney Lumet right now, as the gritty, detached streetwise stylings of his great Dog Day Afternoon and Prince of the City have been nostalgically and somewhat shamelessly aped in pictures this year as wide-ranging as Zodiac, We Own the Night and American Gangster. Still, it bears mentioning that this is also the very same Sidney Lumet who helmed The Wiz, Sharon Stone's misbegotten remake of John Cassavetes' Gloria, and that crazy movie where Melanie Griffith went undercover as a Hasidic Jew. (A Stranger Among Us, 1992). Innovators are not always infallible, especially when they work so tirelessly.

Which is probably why Before the Devil Knows You're Dead feels like such a fresh breath of rancid air. Opening with a revolting, seemingly endless shot of Philip Seymour Hoffman having disgusting doggy-style sex with Marisa Tomei and checking himself out in the mirror the entire time, it's one grim walk on the dark side.

Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play sad-sack brothers drowning in debt. Their only hope is a half-witted scheme to knock off a suburban jewelry store. The place is a mom-and-pop operation, literally--it's run by their parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris)--and nobody's supposed to get hurt. But as Kelly Masterson's mean-as-a-snake screenplay indicates time and again, nothing is simple.

In lesser hands, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead probably would've been one of those glib, post-Tarantino small-time crook ripoffs that littered art houses throughout the '90s. Masterson's sometimes pointlessly fractured timeline certainly indicates aspirations toward Go and Keys to Tulsa mediocrity, but luckily Lumet's savvy direction steers away from such shallow pleasures and into something messier, deeper and less easily shrugged off.

Unfortunately shot on ugly digital video, Before the Devil allows these actors plenty of room to run, foregrounding ancient family resentments instead of narrative gimmickry. Hoffman's closed-off, emotionally asphyxiated real estate shyster bounces brilliantly against Hawke's puppy dog, ne'er-do-well kid brother, even if they look nothing alike. Where most young directors would ramp up the camera gimmickry and highlight the violence, Lumet shrewdly hangs back and observes from a distance, exploiting the long-take potential of his crappy DV and letting scenes play out for what feels like ages, discovering contours in the behavior and granting this naughty little noir a soul that probably never existed on the printed page.

In 1974 director Barbet Schroeder released General Idi Amin Dada, a documentary that actually hung out with the Ugandan general. How did Schroeder ingratiate himself with this paranoid, genocidal maniac? By letting him control its making, allowing him to stage parades and hold fake cabinet meetings meant to cast him in an imperious but jovial light, but which of course only made him look worse. Sly move, Barbet.

Sadly, there are no such covert maneuvers in Schroeder's Terror's Advocate, a documentary featuring rare, extensive chatter with another notorious madman: Jacques Verg�s--lawyer to terrorists, war criminals, Holocaust deniers and almost, back in 2003, Saddam Hussein.

"This film is the director's point of view on Jacques Verg�s, which may differ from the opinions of the people interviewed in it," reads the opening scrawl. But Schroeder never presents his own point of view, nor seems to try to establish one.

It's understandable, of course. Verg�s--filmed in his ornate office with stogie glued in hand--is roughly 10,000 times smarter than Amin, and a pro at caginess when he's not simply deferring to lawyer-client confidentiality. Smirk on face, he's merrily impenetrable, especially when it comes to the deep questions: Is he as awful as the people he defends? Is he a headline-grabbing opportunist or a terrorist himself? Maddeningly, there are no answers, and his cavalier, wisecracking attitude (at one point he jokes about defending Bush, but "only if he pleads guilty") only burrows deeper into your brain.

What to do? Schroeder--who, like Michael Apted, cranks out silly Hollywood fare (like Single White Female) when not immersed in nonfiction--is a smart guy and devises a potent solution: Piece together what he can about Verg�s' life--a lurid, globetrotting affair and the epitome of stranger-than-fiction.

Schroeder scored interviews with just about everyone, even terrorist Hans Joachim Klein, who's in hiding, and pieces everything together into a rollicking yarn, and a chilling portrait of terrorism in the latter half of the 20th century. The candid interview with Verg�s, where he hangs himself with his own words, may not be here (and is likely impossible). But for once it's okay to say you can't have everything.

Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth is a work of genius. Harold Pinter is a genius. And yet the second film version of Sleuth, written by Pinter, is a rotten piece of shit.

Is that because two positives repel each other? A less fanciful theory is that Pinter--the great, Nobel-feted playwright (The Birthday Party, Betrayal) and occasional screenwriter (The Servant, The French Lieutenant's Woman)--should never have been let within a trillion feet of the source. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1972 version starred Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine (as, respectively, an aging best-selling mystery novelist and the man who's cuckolded him), who clash inside the former's tony estate. Caine returns, this time as Olivier, while Jude Law once again does up Caine (after Alfie).

Shaffer's version could've easily degenerated into a tiresome pissing contest, but his masterstroke was to keep things whimsical, filling the tete-a-tetes with elaborate games and even more elaborate turns of phrase. Pinter's update lets it degenerate into a tiresome pissing contest.