Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
dir. Sidney Lumet
It may sound like a limited endorsement (his previous films were
last year’s Find Me Guilty and the 1999 Sharon Stone vehicle
Gloria), but old-timer Sidney Lumet is back with the best
thing he’s done in years: an intense, gripping thriller centered on a
toxic relationship between two brothers. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman)
is a payroll manager with a frustrated trophy wife (a sultry, underused
Marisa Tomei) and a secret drug addiction, and Hank (Ethan Hawke) is a
hapless, divorced father struggling to scrape together child support.
Driven by a combination of financial factors and what might be
described as severe daddy issues (dad is played by Albert Finney, with
chunks of scenery between his teeth), Andy manipulates his brother into
robbing their parents’ jewelry store. It’s not giving away too much to
say it’s the most disastrous holdup since… Lumet’s own Dog Day
Afternoon. But while that movie had flashes of compassion for its
character’s predicament, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is
a thoroughly cynical piece of work. The bad choices in this film are
not the result of good intentions, and the notion of family as refuge
from an unforgiving world is turned on its head.
Lumet and screenwriter Kelly Masterson present the action in
nonchronological fragments, often returning to the same moment to show
it from a new perspective. The structure seems gimmicky at first, but
eventually feels right; the movie doesn’t document a slow descent, but
a rapid downward spiral that sends shards of the story and its
characters’ lives flying in all directions. As we zip back and forth
between the days leading up to the robbery and its panicky aftermath,
the sense of disintegration is palpable.
Rather than let the material play out as a straight crime flick, the
director and writer heighten the pitch, going for something grander and
darker. The emotions are primal, the body count soars, and the
underlying themes of jealousy, guilt, and choice feel weighty and
ancient. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is essentially an
urban take on Greek tragedy, without the catharsis. It’s also so
perversely fun that a few false notes—a pushy score and certain
moments that veer toward a cheaper kind of melodrama—don’t nag as
much as they might have. Lumet’s major coup here is in making the
viewer’s anxiety a ticklish, almost masochistically pleasurable
sensation. What happens in the movie is unhappy stuff, but there’s
mischief in the way each colossally bad decision leads to another, and
you may find yourself smiling at how deftly Lumet and Masterson send
these slippery bastards scrambling toward their fates.
The movie wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does without Hoffman,
who makes Andy both monstrous and almost touching. He nails a delicate
speech in a latter-day opium den, confessing that his “parts don’t add
up”; a tiny moment where he tries to open a door without leaving
fingerprints is a miniature master class in physical acting. Hawke is a
fussier performer, and his desperation feels stagy at times. Still, any
movie with enough balls to suggest that the pig-snouted Hoffman and the
fine-boned Hawke emerged from the same gene pool deserves respect in my
book. JON FROSCH
American Gangster
dir. Ridley Scott
A multitude of cinematic sins can be laid at Sir Ridley Scott’s
feet, ranging from his creation of the MTV blue-light flash style of
filmmaking, to how his early success in commercials paved the way for
the ascent of the Great Satan Michael Bay, or even that his fondness
for smoke machines conceivably sped along global warming by a decade or
more. (See also: Tom Cruise in Legend.) What ultimately
differentiates Scott from his legions of numbskull imitators, though,
is the surprising amount of passion and enthusiasm he pours into his
immaculate images. No matter how insanely detailed his tech-noir
trappings, there’s a genuine pulse lurking deep below.
American Gangster, Scott’s first film since the misguided
but enjoyable A Good Year, feels like one of the rare cases of
the director just phoning it in. Despite an intriguing true story and
the seemingly surefire combo of Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe,
everyone involved seems to be coasting.
Steven Zaillian’s script follows the rise and fall of New York drug
kingpin Frank Lucas (Washington), a small-time bodyguard who hits pay
dirt with an ingenious scheme involving American casualties in Vietnam,
and the one honest cop in the city (Crowe) who vows to take him down.
It’s potentially fascinating stuff, but even the usually dependable
Crowe is stuck in one-note white-bread good-guy mode. (The one
exception is Josh Brolin, who brings a hilariously skuzzy energy to his
role as a graft-happy detective.) Scott’s gift for composition and the
occasional flash of wickedness from Washington keeps this from being a
bad film, precisely, just a disappointing one. ANDREW WRIGHT
Martian Child
dir. Menno Meyjes
The title character in Martian Child is what would result
if Jack Klugman’s single, tattered vocal cord impregnated Anne Heche
and she gave birth to an albino bug. The bug child walks around all day
rasping about Mars, or hiding in a box and demanding Lucky Charms, or
thieving, or totally freaking out while he waits for a real family
(“Boo hoo! Where’s my mother ship?”).
I mean, is there anything cuter than an abused child with severe
emotional problems? That is a rhetorical question, which means shut up.
Dennis, the squeaky bug boy, gets himself adopted by John Cusack, a
science-fiction writer who knows just a leeeetle bit about
alienation himself, if you know what I mean!!! I mean that he was once
nerdy. They have a rough time, then a better time, then a bad time,
then a great time. Martian Child makes its point—which
is basically, “Unconditional love! Go for it!”—with an uninspired
combo of whimsy (“A little martian chose you to teach him about being
human!”) and blunt force (Cusack’s publisher demands, “Why can’t you
just be what we want you to be?”).
This movie is so full of lessons it might have been based on a very
pink bestseller called Everything I Need to Know in Life I Learned
from This Crazy Albino Bug. The only thing that kept me awake was
the possibility that the bug child might actually be from Mars. But
that’s stupid, because everyone knows that Mars doesn’t exist.
Nice try, nerds! LINDY WEST
Sharkwater
dir. Rob Stewart
Rob Stewart, the boyish director and star of this film, can be a
cheeseball. But he is so in love with sharks, and sharks need his love
so much, and so many other people love to hate sharks, that this movie
ranks up there, despite its occasional stinky ripeness, with the best
of the rile-’em-up, change-the-world documentaries. Every man, woman,
and child should be strapped into a chair and shown it.
Because: Did you know that 90 percent of the world’s sharks have
been killed in recent years, largely by being hauled onto a boat,
having their fins sliced off while they shuddered, and then being
thrown back into the water, where they immediately sink to the ocean
floor and bleed to death? You will see this happen many, many times in
Sharkwater. If you love living things, this will be punishing
to watch. If you love only yourself, you still might be moved to
consider that sharks are at the top of the food chain in the world’s
largest ecosystem—the one that allows you to feed and drink and
breathe.
And if you are immune to all these things, that’s fine, because
Sharkwater is a straight-up action flick (it’s a shark
movie!). Between impassioned voiceovers and extended shots of sharks
moving through glimmery water like pretty angels, Stewart spends his
time underwater hugging sharks (briefly!), being chased across borders
by a Central American shark-poaching-mafia gunboat, narrowly avoiding
arrest by a corrupt government, and nearly losing his leg. What did I
tell you? JEN GRAVES
Wristcutters: A Love Story
dir. Goran Dukic
How quirky is too quirky, anyhow? Finally seeing the light of day
after a much-buzzed screening at last year’s Sundance,
Wristcutters: A Love Story hangs on to the edge of enjoyably
oddball without falling into molar-decaying twee.
Working from a novella by cult writer Etgar Keret, director Goran
Dukic posits a universe where all of the world’s suicides are condemned
to work dead-end jobs in a grayscale, noticeably SoCal-ish region of
limbo. When a recent addition (Patrick Fugit) ventures into uncharted
territories in search of an old girlfriend, he runs into a slew of
eccentrics, including an emo hitchhiker (Shannyn Sossamon), who insists
that she’s there due to a clerical foul-up.
It’s much less arch than it sounds, thankfully, with an ingenious
use of found locations and a winning sense of its own absurdities.
Fugit and Sossamon are, admittedly, a shade pale as the leads, but
they’re more than compensated for by a superb supporting cast including
Miranda July fave John Hawkes, Will Arnett, and Tom Waits at his most
beatifically craggled. The rate of invention does sputter a tad during
the last act (right around the time when someone discovers a literal
black hole under a car seat), but when it’s cooking, Dukic’s sharply
muzzy debut favorably recalls the all-too-brief post–Repo
Man era, when the possibilities of indie film seemed
head-bustingly limitless. Oh, and the ending? Dead solid perfection.
ANDREW WRIGHT
