Devil's advocate

Sidney Lumet delivers the verdict on his latest.

May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead, as the saying goes. And may your movie be in theaters before it’s earned a reputation for being as good as the classics Serpico (1973) and Network (1976).

It only premiered on the festival circuit two months ago, but Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead has already been hailed as a comeback for Sidney Lumet—a film on par with his masterworks of the ’50s, ’60 and ’70s. The 83-year-old director is being feted by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, written up in national newspapers and otherwise congratulated on his supposedly two-decades-deferred return to form. (Please. That would be, at the very least, last year’s underrated Vin Diesel vehicle Find Me Guilty, a courtroom comedy that forms a kind of unofficial triptych with two Lumet classics, 12 Angry Men and The Verdict.)

A master craftsman who conducts interviews with a showman’s flair, Lumet seems blasé about the reception of his latest film—on the face of it, a modest heist thriller about two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) who rob their parents’ jewelry store. As in Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the robbery turns out to be a less-than-stellar idea, leading the siblings into a web of blackmail, jealousy and guilt with intimations of Greek tragedy.

“I’ve always liked melodrama, and it’s one hell of a plot,” Lumet said in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Devil had just screened to several faintly surprised raves. “The fun of it is in its lack of humanity. It’s a badness about it. It breaks all the rules about people to identify with. There’s not a single redeeming person in it.”

Certainly, Devil is the kind of hard-edged, character-driven drama that rarely hits screens anymore. “It feels like a vintage ’70s movie, like a movie that came out in 1973 starring Gene Hackman,” says Hawke, arriving late to a separate interview, perhaps because of the throngs of fans outside.

But Lumet shrugs off the notion that the movie, written by first-timer Kelly Masterson, should be classified as a throwback. “I never felt that,” he says. “But a number of people have said that to me, so obviously it does have [an older feel]. Who am I to argue? People draw from it whatever they draw.”

To be fair, there are aspects of Devil that feel totally contemporary. Lumet never made a film in the ’70s, for instance, that opened with Hoffman banging Marisa Tomei from behind. The movie’s chronological jumbling recalls Reservoir Dogs more than Dog Day—although Lumet approaches even that gimmicky device with a classicist’s sense of the subtleties of visual storytelling.

“Every time the story is being told from somebody else’s point of view, the point of view of the movie changes,” he points out. “Shots may seem alike, but they’re not at all alike. They’re shot [with] totally different setups in many instances, lit differently and certainly edited differently.”

With Lumet, you can discuss technique, auteurism and style, but he always returns to story. “What have you got?” he asks. “You’ve got two brothers with discontent in their lives. None of it is grave. And out of one tiny, not even bad decision—wrong decision, stupid decision—from there on in, nobody ever again makes the right decision. Everything from there on in is wrong, wronger, wrongest, to a point where it destroys everything. And I just find that very lifelike—politically, and in terms of behavior.”

Is Devil a political film? “No. That would be giving it wings that it doesn’t have,” Lumet admits. “But I must say it occurred to me afterward.”

Perhaps critics are responding to Lumet’s return to cynicism—something that was missing from Find Me Guilty, in which Lumet decided that it was best to make his “fucking mafia hood” protagonist likable. “There’s that kind of a story, or the Dog Day kind of a story, which are true and totally improbable,” he explains. “And here you’ve got this kind of a story, which is the most improbable. So here the job becomes how do we take fiction—improbable fiction—and get you to suspend your disbelief. And then how do we take improbable reality and get you to believe it? The two are just opposite sides of the same coin and are endlessly interesting to me.”

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead opens Friday 2.

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