Lumet takes what might have been a claustrophobic genre exercise and gives it both moral weight and social insight. His great New York movies of the 1970s and 1980s - Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, Q & A - were realist fables, often based on true stories and always full of dense local knowledge. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is relentlessly focused on the terrible events of a few days, but as it zigzags back and forth in time it takes in a larger, longer story, a history of upward mobility and family displacement.
Some time in the past, a tough New York diamond cutter and his wife moved out to Westchester, where they raised three kids (Hank and Andy have a sister) and ran a nice little business. How that modest little dream begat the nightmare of Hank and Andy's violent fall is an intriguing blank space, a latter-day Theodore Dreiser novel lurking in the shadows of an updated Jim Thompson noir.
Lumet's novelistic instincts - and his generosity with actors - are evident in how richly populated the small, involuted world of this movie feels. Secondary and tertiary characters - Gina; Bobby's wife, Chris (Aleksa Palladino); his thuggish brother-in-law, Dex (Michael Shannon); that old man in the diamond district - do much more than carry the plot forward. Every scene has a sharp, gamy vitality, even when experienced for the second or third time from a different angle and with a new significance.
As pessimistic as it is - you have to squint hard to find the barest flicker of redemption in its denouement - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is also curiously exhilarating. Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well. Even the overwrought performances - Finney's growls, Hawke's twitches - have integrity and conviction. This is a melodrama, after all, and its lifeblood is in the manic acting, just as surely as it is in the plaintive horns of Carter Burwell's score.
My grandfather, whose background was not so different from Lumet's, was dismissive of movies that seemed overly dark or despairing. "There wasn't a single decent human being in the whole movie," he used to complain. He might not have found any in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, but he would also have recognized the humanism that saves this harsh tale from nihilism. The screen may be full of losers, liars, killers and thieves, but behind the camera is a mensch.
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