Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

Premise: To solve their financial crises, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) suggests to his little brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) that they rob a mom-and-pop jewellery store. Only trouble is, it belongs to their mom (Rosemary Harris) and pop (Albert Finney), and it all goes horribly wrong.

Decades after his heyday, director Sidney Lumet, a man who excels at connecting us with ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances (often of their own making), finds a story and a cast worthy of his abilities. Kelly Masterson's debut script cleverly fractures time before and after the robbery, but neither it nor Lumet's camera editorialize the events. They're not so much providing different perspectives on the events as different sets of facts. We see everyone crash together and disperse repeatedly, but it never gets any easier.

Masterson and Lumet's work is aided ably by electric performances turned in by the leads, particularly Hoffman and Hawke. There's an early scene when they are discussing, vaguely, the possibility of committing a "victimless" theft to solve their money problems, and they both come across as lions lying in wait for their prey. Later, when things come apart, Hoffman's Andy unravels before our very eyes, rubbed raw by the realities of his actions. Hawke's Hank, on the other hand, retreats behind his wounded puppy mask in such a way that you can tell he's been getting by on that for years. It's as though he doesn't know how to get angry properly because he doesn't have to. Once you factor in Finney's haunted, somnambulist disconnect, it's a feast.

I'd like to say that Marisa Tomei as Andy's wife, Gina, has the same effect. I can't. I've long thought of Tomei as an underrated and underused actress, and I am sure I will continue to think the same of her in the future. She's definitely talented enough to subtly make it clear when Gina's lying and when Gina's lying to herself. There are moments of genuine vulnerability beneath the veneer. But at the end of the day Gina's a terrible person, and nothing in the script or in the performance redeems her in any way. Using her sexuality to manipulate others because she thinks she's got nothing else is one of the lowest places a woman can go, and Gina lives there full time. I realize that I have been having a problem with supporting actresses lately, wondering if it's a lack of talent that makes their characters so unlikable to me. In the end, I think it's not that they're not talented. I just think that there's enough room for the character to be unlikable and still sympathetic. Patricia Wettig* excels at these kinds of women. Or, come to think of it, Amy Ryan, who appears in both this movie and Gone Baby Gone.

I don't know about this movie. I really liked it, then I really didn't. I forgot about it twice over the day after I saw it. Now, days later, I feel like it's burrowed into my brain, certain scenes playing on repeat in the background somewhere. When I told my mom what I was going to go see, the tone in her voice let me know that she had read something (or possible even multiple some things) bad about the movie. She was right. It goes off the rails right at the end with one man getting away with too much and another doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. There's no dénouement to this movie. It abruptly ends but not ambiguously enough to earn its white light finish. A-

*On an unrelated note, I've realized that all my reference points for male characters are in movies and for women are TV shows. If there were ever a sign about the dearth of good roles for female leads, this would be it.