Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

While we're on the topic of 2007 Oscar movies, there was something about the list of movies that puzzled me up until recently, which was the absence of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, directed by Sidney Lumet.

I had not seen the movie, of course, but Lumet is arguably the greatest living Hollywood director, and the movie was crammed with acting talent like nothing else that came out last year: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney. Without even having seen the movie, I figured it "had" to worthy of major award nominations, but I never got around to watching it on DVD during my run last summer, since it was left off the list.

So a couple days ago when my sister opened up her recently arrived Netflix envelope and read its title to me, I immediately said I wanted to watch it with them.

Seeing a movie at their house here in Massachusetts is almost like having a full theater experience. My brother-in-law has worked in video technology for years, and currently is a manager at a major Internet company that serves online video. He and my sister met while working at a now-famous video editing startup company in the 1990s, and they are currently hoping for a rebound in the stock price of the company for which he now works, since the stock options are the reason he agreed to stay around when his previous start-up was bought up. Things are dicey.

But their home set-up is amazing. In their living room they have a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. Four years ago they introduced me to TiVo with digital satellite television. Now they have two TiVos on the same tv, one for the adults and one for the children, as well as a sophisticated DVD set-up that is stored in the closet of the nearby room. My brother-in-law disappears there like a projectionist when it time to watch a DVD.

In a darkened room, the experience is not unlike a small theater, somewhat a hybrid between a television and a theater. Not bad, all in all.

I was really psyched for the Lumet film. I already knew that the theme was one of Lumet's favorites to direct: a heist gone horribly, horribly wrong. Along those lines I highly recommend The Anderson Tapes (1971) starring Sean Connery and featuring a young Christopher Walken.

One of the common themes in all of Lumet's movies is that he puts he characters through hell, driving them to some point of desperation in which they are willing to commit some act they would not otherwise do. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was exactly that.

Indeed it was. It was really that, in spades. It never let up. It just kept pressing and pressing and pressing. Watching felt like having a noose slowly tighten around my neck.

All of that can be great for a movie, of course, and I really wanted to like the movie, but I found it very difficult to like it. The reason was primarily because of the nonlinear storytelling style, something Lumet has used before as well, for example in the aforementioned Anderson Tapes. It can be a wonderful storytelling tool, but in this case I kept wondering why he had used it. It made it hard, I felt, to follow the trajectory of emotional cause-and-effect. The result was a jagged viewing experience, as disjointed as the frenetic minds of the characters. About an hour and half into the film, I blurted out, "Come on, Sidney, give us some release!" Lumet, being a master, anticipated my reaction by having Marisa Tomei's character pack her bags and walk out the room about five minutes later.

"Take me with you, Marisa!" I yelled at the screen on the wall.

Towards the end of the movie, I began to feel strongly that the movie would have been served much better by a traditional linear storytelling. The disjointed method muted what were awesome performances by the actors, since we did not follow the emotional arc of their experiences. A linear story method would not have felt as clever, or perhaps as artistically daring, but I think it would brought out the contrast of emotions in the story much better. But who am I really, compared to a genius like Lumet?

Nevertheless I could see why it didn't get any Oscar nominations---well, except for the score. It had a freakin' awesome score, written by Carter Burwell.