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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/25/07)

The venerable director Sidney Lumet, whose best films include Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict, isn't known for a signature style. But his finest works have at least one thing in common — once they really get going, they build up a head of emotional and narrative steam that doesn't let up until the final frame.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lumet's latest, is a searing thriller about family and crime and all the worst betrayals encompassing both. Hoffman plays Andy, a putatively successful New York real-estate broker with a dissatisfied trophy wife (Tomei), some debts, and a spiraling heroin habit. After an idyllic Brazil vacation with wife Gina, Andy fixates on somehow getting back there and starting anew. He envisions a big score — knocking off a pushover jewelry store out on the island. Said store's a pushover because he knows it like the back of his hand, as it's owned and run by his parents (Finney and Harris). Andy bullies his passive ne'er-do-well brother Hank (Hawke) into doing the actual dirty work of his plan; the less-than-confident Hank enlists a shady pal (O'Byrne) to help out; and things go much, much worse than one could begin to imagine. Complicating matters is the fact that Gina's been allaying her dissatisfaction by sleeping with Hank. And that Andy's relationship with his father Charles is, as one might have inferred, fraught.

Lumet, who substantively reworked the script by first-timer Kelly Masterson (among other things, he made Hank and Andy brothers), tells the story in steady switches between flash-forward and flashback, rewinding bits of the chronology and showing events from one particular character's point of view. It's a risky strategy and one Lumet hasn't tried before, but he pulls it off beautifully. Always an actors' director, Lumet pulls extraordinary performances from his cast. Hoffman's Andy is smarmy and sleazy but you can see the fat awkward kid inside him, and the anger that kid's been piling up for his entire life. As always, the actor shows his unerring ability to find and flesh out his character's most mortifyingly human lows; he's a poet of the humiliated. Finney summons up some mighty nasty emotions himself, throwing us off guard after his initially gruffly avuncular portrayal of the patriarch. Hawke is deft and sympathetic in clueless/defensive mode, while Tomei — whose character is literally the most exposed, as she's largely half-nude throughout — makes Gina's willful, messed-up frustration palpable.

The picture brims with the sort of special New York detail Lumet's a past master at, particularly in the creepy scenes in which Hoffman's character lounges at the ultramodern apartment of his high-end drug dealer. The action is violent, messy, and threaded through with dark humor. This is a movie for grownups, for sure, but it has a mulish kick that most such pictures consider themselves to tasteful to aspire to. That Lumet is 83 years old makes his unsparing accomplishment almost preternaturally impressive.

— Glenn Kenny