Movie Review: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

J and I rented this movie last night. It got overwhelmingly good reviews on metacritic and rotten tomatoes.

The movie is about two brothers who decide to rob their own parents' jewelry store. The premise of the movie might have made a fine comedy.

However, comedies don't generally make you feel empty and dirty for watching them. Not dirty as if you were watching something smutty. But dirty as in having witnessed something deadening and lacking in humanity. There is nothing uplifting about this movie, nothing redemptive. The characters are incredible unlikeable. Fat and Sweaty drug-addicted Phillip Seymour Hoffman, his Nervous and Sweaty brother Ethan Hawke, Ethan Hawke's bitchy ex-wife and bitchy daughter, Slutty and Useless Marisa Tomei, and a whole cast of other characters leave you with the impression that human beings are awful and unpleasant to be around. Every other word out the characters' mouth is a swear word. The brothers' father, Albert Finney, is initially slightly sympathetic but the lesson of the movie is that everyone is 2 steps away from being totally evil. Hence the title I guess.

Awful Awful movie. terrible soundtrack (ponderous, repetitive, faux-sombre). A lot of things made no sense. Why would Ethan Hawke have been the favored son, leading to Seymour Hoffman's resentment? Ethan Hawke played a sweaty loser that no parent would love that much. Why did Sidney Lumet decide, in his eighties, to make this soulless film? Has his long life taught him this, that there is no redemption or joy in life but "chaos, hostility, and murder?" (cf. Werner Hertzog).

I wish I hadn't seen this movie.