Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 6:59 pm 
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PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, ETHAN HAWKE

Like a train wreck

This movie directed by the 83-year-old Sidney Lumet brings to mind Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Depending on how you look at it, Tarantino is either the grand master or the infamous originator of the scrambled time-line. Reservoir Dogs begins after a disastrous failed jewelry store robbery and follows, with overlapping chronologies, the subsequent behavior of various participants who wind up in a warehouse. The title of this new botched jewelry store heist picture comes from an Irish toast: May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. According to Lumet, the screenplay came in over the transom from one Kelly Masterson. Lumet wasn't sure, at a press Q&A, if Masterson was a man or a woman, so they don't seem to be close. Lumet did the rewriting. This included making the primary characters behind the robbery not just friends but brothers—a very important touch, because it turns the movie into a story of total family meltdown so intense and fatalistic it's been compared to Greek tragedy.

When we meet them, nothing is going very well for either elder brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) or baby brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Andy is embezzling his company to pay for his expensive drug habit. Things aren't clicking between him and his wife Gina (Marisa Tomei), and unbeknownst to Andy, Gina's sleeping with Hank. Hank's in deep financial trouble and behind in his child-support. He's a lovable loser who seems barely capable of delivering a pizza— which makes you wonder why Andy should want to talk him into carrying out a robbery..What Andy doesn't own up to at first is that the place to be robbed is their own parents' "mom and pop" strip mall jewelry store. Holding that back from the audience to surprise us with it later seems to be maybe the main reason for the scrambled time scheme. Hank knows he can't do a robbery himself. He secretly enlists a seedy character he knows named Bobby (Brian F. O'Byrne) to enter the store while he waits in a rental car.

Bobby's a tough guy all right, but hey, none of these boys is the sharpest knife in the drawer. Bobby makes a hash of the heist, and in the process of getting himself killed, also shoots Hank and Andy's own mother (Rosemary Harris), who just happens to be minding the shop that day because an employee couldn't make it.

Reservoir Dogs skips the actual robbery scene, which instead is reconstructed indirectly in subsequent dialogue. Masterson/Lumet's screenplay includes the scene of the disastrous robbery, then goes back and forth over the four days prior to it and the week following it in chronologically scrambled segments. These are a problem. Lumet had to add labels giving date and point of view for them, because he himself couldn't follow where they fell in the time-line. What you can't tell on viewing the film is why they need to be so scrambled other than to conceal, for a while anyway, how dumb this robbery scheme is. They certainly do show what a lot of trouble the brothers are in, before they make things a whole lot worse.

Lumet knew this plot-based movie would need great acting to put across the characters and screw the emotions up to a fever itch. He began by hiring on an ace performer, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was given choice of which brother to play. Then Hawke was called in; and Hawke gives a surprisingly strong performance as a weak man. Albert Finney as Charles, the father, naturally maintains the intensity level. And Tomei fits. The cops aren't helpful, so Charles decides to find out on his own who staged this robbery, and he seems to know where to look. Bobby had a kid, and the brother of the kid's mother, Dex (Michael Shannon), who's no more fun to be with than Bobby, comes looking for Hank, and finds him. Excrement hits fan.

Before the Devil excels in its powerful evocation of total meltdown. But it reads as something that goes too slow at first, than rushes too much at the end. Lumet, who's astonishingly vigorous at 83 and is said to work incredibly fast still, calls this story "melodrama," which he defines as requiring suspension of disbelief and the unrolling of events at shocking speed. Arguably too much happens at the end for us to care, and though it's by intention that not everything is explained about how the characters end up, the ending really provides less the catharsis of Greek tragedy than the sensation of having witnessed a train wreck. The element of Tarantino that you most miss is his voluptuously absurd dialog (the talk here is relatively pedestrian). You also keenly miss Tarantino's use of the well-placed dramatic pause. The Devil needs to take some breaks. Yet despite its flaws, this is still one of the year's freshest, best-acted crime pictures.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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