Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead isn’t so much a heist picture as a post-heist picture, a film about the sad and deadly spiral of greed and evil that follows two brothers who plan a robbery of their own parents’ jewelry store. As a genre, this is a small one, and often overlooked; only a few films, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs among them, go after it with such gusto.

The novelty may explain the gushing critical reaction. It’s undoubtedly a strong film, gripping and tersely paced throughout, and many have compared it to Lumet’s classic, and undeniably brilliant, foray into the heist picture, Dog Day Afternoon. But though the subject matter is broadly similar—a holdup in New York goes deadly wrong—the two films are hardly of equal stature.

Dog Day earned its classic status not only though its taut pacing, but through its lovingly crafted cast of characters, and its subtle portrayal of the social frictions of 1970s New York. Rather than simply existing for their own sake, the genre elements fused into a framework by which to examine a place and an era. The film was, in other words, about more than the robbery, or even its aftershocks.

Devil, on the other hand, is content simply to wind up its ingenious little Rube Goldberg of a story and let it play out. A number of the supporting characters are flat, functional stereotypes who appear only so they can help keep Lumet’s narrative machine running. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, and the movie is still almost certainly one of the year’s best. But it’s just genre—albeit very, very cleverly constructed genre—and shouldn’t be mistaken for anything more.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 5:28 PM and is filed under The Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.