Captivating Losers: Before the Devil Knows Your Dead
By Demon
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I just saw Before the Devil Knows Your Dead and as I walked to the parking lot I couldn’t help but wonder “why?”
The movie is non-stop incredible acting and technical mastery, but it’s also the kind of painful-to-watch movie that leaves one yearning for some kind of moral message or insightful thematic statement by the end credits to justify all the misery one has endured.
Otherwise, why would one watch (much less pay to watch) two warped brothers rob their own parents, indirectly kill their own mother, and then be stalked and revenged by their own father? The theater of cruelty is supposed to be cruel for a reason, after all. Entertainment never has to justify itself to the audience — but cruelty does.
As I drove home and searched the movie for my lesson in family values, the more I started to think maybe there just wasn’t one. I mean, the protagonist brothers in Before the Devil mumble occasionally about trust and love, but I’m not sure either of them know anything about these things. Certainly not enough to instruct the viewer.
And Dad certainly isn’t offering any bedside lessons in forgiveness, either.
These are some screwed up guys… drugging, cheating, lying, and eventually murdering. At times the brothers provoke our sympathies with the sad state of affairs they have created for themselves through drug addiction, financial woes, and bad relationships, but both of them remain resounding losers by the end of the film — albeit, captivating ones (although one is a dead loser and the other slightly improved by standing up to his brother).
These losers have only one thing to teach us: whatever you do, don’t turn out like them.
Don’t rob your own parents. Even if you’re stuck in a hole. Even if you’re a doper. Even if your wife is Marissa Tomei and she needs to get her Brazilian bikini wax redone - in Brazil. For the Gods do not smile favorably on such things.
The morally flawed characters in Before the Devil bear some resemblance to the “hero” in Lumet’s previous outing, Find Me Guilty. Here is another strange movie that shows us a man with all his brutal, ultimately unfixable flaws. Although Vin Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio is charming, he is also a hardened, unapologetic criminal. And because of this, he never quite wins our hearts.
Is Lumet is creating an entirely new oeuvre for himself after literally decades of making movies — the story of broken men who can only flirt with redemption but never accomplish it? Or has Lumet just gone batty and forgotten why Serpico adopts a big, shaggy puppy — so we don’t forget to love him. Or does it really matter?
In both films, Lumet has presented us with protagonists who are deeply flawed — and not by some romantic quirk that gets reversed in the third act. These are figures leading lives of irredeemable unglory. In showing us fundamentally irreparable characters, Lumet is perhaps doing something the “greatest” Hollywood movies don’t dare to accomplish without fear of alienating the majority of popcorn munchers at the multiplex.
And maybe there is a lesson in that.
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