Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead starts with a sex scene that’s important for being so out-of-place. In movie shorthand, it suggests a prostitute and a john: The man is paunchy, she is lithe, and he’s taking her from behind. Surely, one of them will awaken in the morning and find the other dead. Isn’t that nearly always the aftermath?
It turns out they’re married, and on vacation. They’re briefly happy, and they’re as surprised by that as the audience should be that they both survive the sexual encounter. Alas, their conjugal bliss droops like a spent erection (sorry), and we’re shifted to a different place, where a title card sets the time in relation to a robbery.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is Andy, the husband, and Marisa Tomei is the wife. He’s been embezzling money from the company for which he works, and he sucks his ne’er-do-well brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a robbery scheme. Their target speaks to their lack of imagination, as does an expected take measured in the tens of thousands of dollars.
So there are two elements at work here: family drama and crime, and I emphasize this because screenwriter Kelly Masterson has constructed something that balances the story’s thriller conventions with ostensible human elements.
Burnt Toast