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This 2007 Film Starring Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a Wild Thriller With a Killer Cast
It takes gigantic, super-sized talent to play creepy criminals this small.
It’s got “devil” in the title and, thanks to some time-jumping cleverness, a thriller plot that’s plenty suspenseful. But despite its scary-sounding name, don’t go into Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (streaming here on Peacock) expecting anything resembling a horror movie.
Well, that is, unless your idea of horror is watching awesome actors duke it out for the title of biggest (and most fatally sociopathic) sleaze. The 2007 final film in the long, incredible career of the late, great director Sidney Lumet (Network, Serpico, The Wiz), the movie takes its macabre title not from Old Scratch, but from a well-known Irish salutation: “May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the devil knows you're dead.”
The killer cast of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead - Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman & more
That salubrious Irish toast carries the winking admission that its target is probably burning a hedonic, carefree path straight to hell — and in this slow-simmering thriller of a movie, that’s still too kind a tribute to its snaky, undeserving pair of lead characters.
Ethan Hawke (Gattaca, The Black Phone) stars as a craven but affable burnout named Hank, besieged by his more forceful brother, Andy (in a stark and stellar turn from the late, iconic Philip Seymour Hoffman), to commit to one whopper of a loser’s get-out-of-debt scheme. Needing some quick cash for different (but equally mundane and unambitious) reasons, they’ll rob their parents’ suburban strip-mall jewelry store, staying careful all the while to make sure no one gets hurt — and that their actual parents won’t be anywhere close when the dastardly deed goes down.
Each inept in his own sad way, Andy and (especially) Hank manage to botch the entire job, with Hank bringing on board a more criminally-competent helper (played by Brían F. O’Byrne) while Andy — who’s controlling the whole scheme from a safe phone call’s distance — remains no more the wise. Bad idea: The criminal tagalong is packing a real gun instead of the prop pistol Andy thought Hank would brandish, and of course that leads to an inevitable exchange of gunfire that immediately kills Hank’s accomplice. Worse, it mortally wounds Hank and Andy’s poor mother (Rosemary Harris), who’d been unlucky enough to show up for an unplanned day’s work at the store.
That’s only half of the twisted fun within the movie’s bigger story. None other than the late Albert Finney stars as Charles, the brothers’ shocked and bereaved father, and Charles puts his remaining octogenarian’s energy into tracking down the creep responsible for killing his poor wife. A casting standout in every film he ever made, Finney (Big Fish, Skyfall) plays Charles with a determined and dignified old man’s pathos. Sure, he’s devastated that the love of his life is gone… but he’ll be damned if a hindrance like overwhelming grief can prevent him from getting to the bottom of her tragic murder.
The audience knows long before Charles does that his own sons are behind the needless crime, making it all the more awful when late events eventually spiral and lead Charles to hear the truth straight from Andy. By then, a pattern has emerged among all of the film’s core cast: Everyone — perhaps none more than Marisa Tomei as Andy’s duplicitous but patient wife Gina — leaves their actor’s ego at the door for this film, with Lumet drawing out the kind of vulnerable and committed performances that elevate Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead into something far more haunting than a mere thriller.
Suspense aside, the trick to appreciating a movie that’s this sad, and one that features myopically selfish characters this hollow, is to stand back and regard how completely the cast pulls it all off. Hawke, Hoffman, Finney, and Tomei each manages to elicit pity for the characters they play — until they remind you just how cowardly, needy, and vapidly evil you have to be to think any step in their wicked little schemes ever sounded like a good idea.
Stream Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead on Peacock here.
