Sidney Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (Find Me Guilty, Strip Search, Guilty as Sin) titled after a famous Irish blessing, “may you be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you’re dead” is a moral parody of the familial bonds between brothers, and their relationship with their parents. In a desperate, rushed, and miserably failed heist attempt of a jewelry store (the second one so far in this year’s VIFF), where the older brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) convinces his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents’ jewels, we uncover plural disappointed lives, an adulterous wife, a drug-addict husband, and families which are too often reduced to financial arrangements or disasters.
Shot in an uber-high-definition digital “film,” the continuity is intentionally broken up to give us replays (albeit, from different angels) of various pivotal scenes in the film. Such “replays” not only result in (a) underlying the conflicting human condition of the subjects in the film in key scenes of the film, but allow us to (b) witness how these characters perform under not one but also plural gazes, the gaze of the spectator who’s already processed an event in the film, and the other when s/he has processed the scenes twice, rethinking them with a stricter, more critical eye.
The most poignant line in the film is “Nothing connects to anything else, an is not the sum of all its parts,” where Andy sums up his confession and coming-to-terms with his own life as an absolute disaster, a life that he swore would end better than his father’s, a the life which he loses miserably, whilst trying to hill his brother, Hank. This film is a blunt and honest telling of the potential people have for betrayal, not only given the right circumstances, but also given the apathy for their own life, happiness, and righteousness.
PICTURE CREDIT: VIFF Picture Database. Used With Permission.
SIMILAR POSTS:
PREVIOUS POSTS: « VIFF Review: Mischief Night | MAIN PAGE | The Man in the Goalie Mask »
