Tweet

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD

I mistakenly wrote off Sidney Lumet some years ago after a succession of his poor films, with Melanie Griffith as an undercover Chasid in Williamsburg; Don Johnson, Griffith’s husband at the time, playing a womanizing murder defendant; Andy Garcia as a forlorn D.A.; Sharon Stone in an unnecessary remake of Cassavetes’ “Gloria,” followed by Lumet’s return to television after 45 years. Actually, I’ve heard there were good things about his recent courtroom drama with Vin Diesel, “Find Me Guilty,” (2006), though no one attended its solo, week’s run in New York. But with ThinkFilm’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Lumet, at 83, (whose first film was the brilliant “12 Angry Men,” in 1955), is in top form. This is more than can be said for the Festival’s French 80-year-olds, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, who are going through the motions of repeating themselves.

“Before the Devil…” is outrageously melodramatic and full of the vigor of a director half Lumet’s age. A gifted actors’ director, Lumet even gets terrific turns from Ethan Hawke and Brian F. O’Byrne, whose inept characters botch the film’s early but central jewelry store heist, (heists usually take place as the climax to a film.) Messrs. Hawke and O’Byrne, after making this film, gave extraordinarily pompous, though highly praised performances in the tedious “The Coast of Utopia,” a Tom Stoppard stage trilogy I hope you missed.
That Hawke and O’Byrne are electrifying as a couple of incompetent and panicked robbers who attempt to knock over a mom and pop jewelry store in a Westchester strip mall, says much about Lumet’s ability to get actors to transcend themselves. The famous stage actors, Rosemary Harris (who gets bumped off) and Albert Finney (who grieves and seeks revenge on the surviving perpetrator) are the actual mom and pop of the scheming brothers, played by Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Both unlikely-looking brothers desperately need the payload they hope to obtain from the robbery. Hoffman plays an overextended and overweight real estate payroll manager who has been ripping off his firm to obtain his costly hard drugs and to placate his dissatisfied wife (Marisa Tomei), with whom his younger and more attractive brother (Hawke) is secretly having an affair. The Hawke brother is so broke he can’t pay his back alimony, owed his ex-wife (a furious Amy Ryan), or even pay for his young daughter’s class field trip as he had promised. Hoffman is immense in more ways than one. He easily manipulates his strapped and credulous brother by selling the robbery as a simple knockover in which no one can possibly get hurt.
If I tell you that the opening scene of the film shows the full-figured Hoffman rear-ending Tomei, you know that the picture begins and ends with a banging and a bang. When Hoffman challenges his father as to his actual paternity, Finney slaps him so devastatingly hard, that I am still reeling from the impact. This is a blow to remember, as is Hoffman’s putting his fist through a window pane in a front door to get to his weasel brother Hawke’s apartment. It hurts, like this whole electrically-charged picture, which is helped by Carter Burwell’s ominously percussive score and amplified sound effects.
Sidney Lumet has rarely left his base in New York, and like the famous writers who have limned this city, Lumet’s New York is now legendary. His new cameraman, Ron Fortunato, likes to move in closer than any of his previous lensers have, though Lumet is one director who likes to call every shot himself, as well as dictating which lens to use. This is the first Lumet film, I recall, in which both male and female characters are unclothed, but I guess that’s part of letting it all hang out at 83. For the record, Marisa Tomei is in captivating shape.
After the screening, a viewer made the acute equation between the familial bloodletting of “Before The Devil…” with those of Greek tragedy. That is certainly the bloodbath Eugene O’Neill had in mind in writing his own Orestia set in the Civil War, “Mourning Becomes Electra.” Of course, “Before the Devil…” observes none of the Greek unities, inter-cutting scenes taking place four days before the robbery, during the failed heist, and some days afterward in seemingly haphazard but revelatory sequence, marked by time and date titles.
At a press conference, Mr. Lumet was obliged to admit that he didn’t know if the film’s accredited, though novice screenwriter, Kelly Masterson, was a man or a woman. (It’s a guy!) I guess we know from this admission who revised the script without consultation. I understand that among Lumet’s major punch-ups of the script was to make the thieves actual brothers, although Hawke and Hoffman hardly look fraternal. “You’re looking great,” Sidney!

REDACTED

Brian De Palma’s “Redacted: a fictional documentary” (Magnolia Pictures), about an act of violence in the Iraq War–shot in bleached color in the old, box-like screen dimension as well as in home video and high definition–is a low-budget video verite successor to De Palma’s previous Vietnam war atrocity drama, “Casualties of War,” (1989), shot in bright color Panavision and starring Michael J. Fox as the platoon’s super-ego and wild man Sean Penn as its naked id.
“Redacted,” the term for censoring by blacking out names, faces, and wartime horrors, is based on an actual March 2006 incident in which five U.S. soldiers gang-raped and murdered a 14-year-old Iraqi girl (she is a comely 15 in “Redacted”) and, subsequently, shot her mother, father, grandmother and five-year-old sister and torched the bodies to cover their atrocity.
In “Redacted,’’ the film stock is drained of any vibrant color and the platoon is composed of no-name actors so naturalistic and unappealing you would swear that De Palma had cast a group of former GIs. These grunts sweat and curse in the “oven” of Iraq without obtaining any release from their pent-up sexuality or the constant fear of an I.E.D. explosion, which dematerializes one of their number.
“Casualties of War” had a script by the warrior playwright David Rabe, while “Redacted” was authored by De Palma himself. Like Rabe, DePalma appears to know every dirty word, though he is a less able writer.
The tedious mission of this platoon is to man a check-point in order to slow down approaching cars. However, the young Iraqi man, urgently driving his overdue, pregnant sister to the hospital, can’t slow down, so he is gunned down in delivering mother and child to their death. (That’s the first atrocity, in the film, committed by the troop.)
The chief video-within-a-film device concerns a sweet Hispanic, Angel Salaza (Izzy Diaz) who keeps a video journal of his mates and their doings, including the nighttime gang rape and murders of the pretty young girl and her family, which proves incriminating evidence when the insurgents get hold of it. (Angel hopes its verite will prove a post-war credential for him to enter film school.) Along with terrorist postings, YouTube videos, Arabic news broadcasts, and a French documentary, the film becomes a nightmare video collage.
All of “Redacted”’s day-to-day tedium makes for a very hard-to-take 90 minutes, including an amazingly veristic shot of the insurgents’ retaliatory beheading of Angel, and a series of authentic color photos of mutilated and dead Iraqis (the shots which Iraq war photographers cannot sell) which rival Goya’s black and white etchings, “The Horrors of War.”
The equation is made by this metaphoric film that Iraq is merely a repetition of Vietnam and that we should never have invaded or occupied this non-threatening country. Both the incursion and the occupation are viewed as an atrocity. We have, writes De Palma “in fact, raped not just an innocent girl, we have raped the entire country. [We’ve] destroy[ed] the country: it is burned, dead, ravished.”
The crude handheld footage in “Redacted” and the Arabic video station’s framing format hark back to the countercultural devices of De Palma’s first, independent films of the early ‘70s, especially “Greetings” (1968) and the “Be Black, Baby” pseudo-documentary in his Vietnam era satire, “Hi, Mom!” (1970)
“Redacted” is a notable low-budget ($5 million, 18 day) departure for De Palma, now 67, from his recent, glossy fiascos, “Femme Fatale,” “Mission to Mars,” and “The Black Dahlia,” but, like them, it is also a failure.
The war film convention of a platoon of dumb grunts, with the exception of two cultivated men, are unusually loathsome company, though authentically performed by De Palma’s no-name cast.
So many of the scenes bear bottom-of-the screen time codes, for video authenticity, you come to think the footage is actually suitable for editing.
The sound track is chiefly filled by a Handel’s famed sarabande, the stately and dirge-like anthem notably employed throughout Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” (1975), a savage take on war in the Napoleonic era, as well as a powerful Verdi-like overture that has the quality of a sustained moan.
Oddly, like the photo montages that conclude Lars von Trier’s historical American indictments, “Dogville” ((2003) and “Manderlay” (2005), which assembled photos of American Depression era indigents (by Dorothea Lange) and lynched and downtrodden blacks in “Manderlay,” it is De Palma’s concluding color photos of Iraq atrocities (with the faces redacted by Magnolia Pictures) which eclipse his current wartime tale of horror. However, the film is heavy anti-war propaganda, and wacko, pro-war Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, has been trashing “Redacted” and its’ flamboyant, left-wing, billionaire backer, Mark Cuban, although the film has been advertising on O’Reilly’s sleazy show. By panning it, O’Reilly is actually promoting it.

Continue to page: 1 2 3 4 5 6