A Most Violent Year

This film by J.C. Chandor is all about the gray areas, something quite uncommon in American movies.  It is also most uncommon for American movies to have a Latino protagonist (played by an actual Latino actor who speaks Spanish perfectly), but that doesn't make a big deal about him being Latino (no piñatas, no mariachis, no extended family, just a guy who is integrating to the American Way Of Life). This may seem like a small thing, but it isn't. More movies like this need to be made.
The great Oscar Isaac plays Abel Morales (Abel, like the guy in the Bible, with a very moral last name), an ambitious businessman who owns a heating gas company in New York in the 80s.
He is expanding his business, buying some dilapidated docks in Brooklyn from Orthodox Jews that will give him a huge advantage over his competitors. Meanwhile, his drivers endure violent attacks: someone is stealing his trucks. The world of gas peddlers is apparently not very genteel. They try to screw one another by hook or by crook. Abel refuses to play dirty or even arm his drivers so they can defend themselves. He refuses to touch a gun. Meanwhile, the deed to the new property comes with a deadline. He needs to get the money to pay for it within 30 days, and the pressures mount.
Abel is married to Anna (Jessica Chastain), whose father, we learn, is a mafioso from Brooklyn.
Abel seems all rectitude, even with his camel hair coats and a junior pompadour a la John Gotti. Anna is more of a moll and more of a loose cannon. I was happy to see Chastain playing a vamp. She also wears a coat like a suit of armor, she chain smokes and is far more volatile than her husband. She keeps the books, and for all of Abel's efforts to remain squeaky clean, she seems to be cooking them. A district attorney (the ubiquitous David Oyelowo) has a bunch of claims of fraud against the Morales. So what gives? Are they kosher or not?
We think we are watching a film about the mafia, but we are watching a film about business, which is like the mafia but more legal. Ruthlessness is built into entrepreneurship; what Abel refuses to be is illegal. We root for him to get what he wants, if anything, because he is so convincing. Isaac plays him with a recognizable nod to Michael Corleone (that is, young Al Pacino), but my filmgoing companion was convinced that Isaac is also channelling Barack Obama. His deliberateness, his calm under pressure, and a certain hauteur convey someone with power; in his case, someone at the cusp of power who knows how it is supposed to walk and talk.
Julian (Elyes Gabel), one of Abel's drivers and a personal protegé, gets roughed up by hoods who steal his truck. Unlike Abel, Julian does not have a spine. He is the weak link in the story, even though he is pivotal to the plot. His storyline feels contrived. He is there to be the foil and opposite of Abel, but the stitching shows. He is the only character who does not have the sangfroid of the brisk business people around him. He freaks out, he sweats, he panics and he screws everything up. Nothing wrong with that, except that Gabel is not at the level of the rest of the otherwise perfect cast; he seems to belong in a more histrionic movie.
Why is it that American movies have such a hard time camouflaging the mechanics of plot and character? Leviathan, a Russian movie and a similar dark tale of ambition, presents characters as people, not as plot devices. A Most Violent Year is a riveting movie, but it falters when it gets schematic. Bradford Young's cinematography is yellowish, opaque, and in many scenes, too dark. It fails to emulate the dramatic chiaroscuro of the Godfather movies as well as the genuine grit of the New York movies of Sidney Lumet, both of which it seems to pay homage to. Bradford Young did a stellar job with Selma, so I think that this is a problem of style getting in the way.
Chandor takes his time to introduce Abel's world, and when the violence of the title comes, it comes in shocking spurts. This is very well done, and a chase scene, reminiscent of The French Connection, is truly ironic and suspenseful.
In the end, Abel learns that trying to keep clean as he rises in stature is going to be a lifelong struggle in a world where no one else seems to mind the dirt. All he can try to do, as he memorably puts it, is to take the path that is the most right.

Margin Call

It looks like hype was looking for an Occupy Wall Street movie and found this one right on time. Its timeliness will no doubt help conceal the fact that it isn't a very good movie. It is entertaining and spottily enjoyable, a valiant but flawed effort by noticeably inexperienced writer-director J.C. Chandor.
David Denby has lost his last marble by saying that it's the best movie ever made about Wall Street. The screenplay feels like an early draft, the cinematography and the staging are mostly inept, and given that some of it does work, it squanders many opportunities to make its point, whatever it is, clearly and forcefully. If it is trying to do what Downfall did for Hitler, that is, give human dimension to these greedy bastards, it fails. There is a difference between having ambivalent or ambiguous characters and characters who act incoherently within the premise they have been set up in, which is what happens with most of the characters here.
As I could not clearly understand the point of this movie, I surmise that these are its two main premises:
1. The investment bankers gambling other people's money in their glass bubble above Manhattan did not fully know or even understand what they were doing, and the few that did looked the other way as long as the profits kept coming.
2. Huge piles of money are thrown at or withheld from these characters like carrots or sticks, and therefore, they feel they have no choice either way. All the characters are immobilized by greed, or the system, or the need for money, hence nobody has any principles.
The problem is, paralysis and general spinelessness may be true to life, but they are unsatisfying dramatic choices. Characters who know and fear the worst are much more exciting than characters who know nothing and just look stricken at the sight of a computer screen. You could have the most appalling villains and make the audience care for them if they have their own skewed integrity, but in this movie nobody rises to the challenge.
Paradoxically, documentary films about financial shenanigans like Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Inside Job feel more urgent and deliver more of a blow to the gut. The reason for this is mainly in the writing. Margin Call has lots of expository speeches but little action; hence, the stakes, high as they are, don't feel as urgent as they should. We are told the world of these investment bankers is about to collapse, but we don't see it happening to them, they just explain it to us. When Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), is asked how he can blow a yearly two and a half million dollar salary, he meticulously lists his budget: what goes towards taxes, the mortgage, the flashy car, the expensive wardrobe, restaurants, booze and whores, which he can deduct as entertainment. The enormous figures sound realistic, but it would be more compelling to see what is at stake for him, or at least to see how this has personal consequences. Yet nobody in this movie, despite sweating buckets at the sight of gnarly numbers, seems to have a personal stake or a reaction, except for maybe losing their jobs. They already have so much money, it's like bubkes to them. This might be realistic, but it is dramatically flaccid. If I held a gazillion stock options valued at $95 a share and the next minute they are worth 65 cents, I would have a big reaction, believe me.
The film begins tautly enough with a well executed sequence of massive layoffs at a prestigious investment firm, where two ruthlessly efficient female enforcers calmly tell Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) that he is now finished at the firm, all his communications with it severed. He leaves his unfinished files with junior analyst Peter Sullivan, who then does the math and discovers a financial catastrophe waiting to happen. Eric is fired and his attitude is one of resignation rather than revenge or indignation.
At the same time, Peter Sullivan is an actual rocket scientist who ends up working at this firm because the money is better than in academia. After two years in such a cutthroat place, he still behaves like a Pollyanna. Resignation, like innocence or timidity, are boring dramatic choices, and soon, despite a certain show of ambition that is not fully exploited, Sullivan's dramatic thread runs dry as well. So the movie jumps to Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who is like the den mother and cheerleader of his floor, and has been in that place for over thirty years, egging youngsters on to give it all for the firm, surviving by stopping his ears to all the unseemly financial misdeeds. He's supposed to have feelings because his dog is dying (the cheapest way to telegraph humanity). Remember Hitler in Downfall? He was nice to dogs and secretaries, but the genius of that movie is that the more humanly Hitler was portrayed, the more of a monster he became. He might have been insane, but he was not an incoherent character. Sam (whom I am not comparing to Hitler) oscillates between humanity and ruthless efficiency. He seems to have a bit of a backbone, loyalty to the firm (which is over 100 years old and no one seems to give a shit), but then he acts spinelessly, and we do not quite understand why. The way the script is written, the stuff that needs to drive the action surfaces after the fact, (turns out he needs the money). This kills the dramatic tension. If we had known that Sam has a conflict between, let's say, his debts and his loyalty to the firm, we'd be hanging at the edge of our seats, but the way it's played, it doesn't so much feel like a betrayal but like a deflation. And so we are left with a hazy collection of characters whom we have trouble understanding. Their motivations, money notwithstanding, are not personal enough. Worse, nobody in this movie fights back, even for craven reasons, like greed or revenge. They all rather take the check, which is humanly credible but it flatlines the movie.
If Margin Call feels like a better movie than it is, it's because the cast is immensely enjoyable to watch, and several individual scenes work nicely. Chandor does a good job of keeping the entire cast at a very balanced, high level of performance. They all seem to belong to the same universe, which is quite a feat.
Jeremy Irons is over the top but mesmerizing as John Tuld, a Dick Fuld or some such megamaster of the universe type. Irons, like Spacey, is an actor who can do fifteen states of mind in one scene, and he nails the studied charm of the supremely arrogant. His scene in the boardroom is a roller coaster ride of imperiousness, coyness, false modesty, a man who is playing the part his underlings expect from him; a smorgasbord of acting. He goes to town, but despite his expansive performance, he is there to represent The Evils of Capitalism, but is not very believable as a flesh and blood character. And as much as I adore Irons, I have a beef with the fact that his character is British and not American, as he should be. The villainy we are all up in arms about today was mostly homegrown; why make it foreign? Why couldn't Irons do an American accent? To me, this choice undermines the story and makes it ring faker than it should.
Not even Kevin Spacey seems to believe the business with the dog. Still, what he is capable of communicating before he even opens his mouth is astonishingly precise, and he is equally sharp when he speaks. He's like a microsurgeon. He takes a line comprised solely of the word "what" and quietly turns it into a mini drama. And it is nice to see him playing a defanged shark, for a change. He is superb.
Demi Moore, who is excellent, is wasted in a role that has a huge turn that then goes nowhere, but she has one amazing scene in which her expression registers bitter regret at having pursued a life at the shark tank, instead of something more fulfilling. She's so good, one wishes she would abandon professional celebritydom and come back to acting. Simon Baker is very good but unexplored as an icy Jared Cohen. Paul Bettany is excellent but also left behind as a cold bastard who turns out to be not so horrible after all. And poor Stanley Tucci gets a potentially juicy role and has to settle with non-action. The actors deserve kudos for making much more of their characters than what they were given to play with.
There are some nice touches about the way corporations work: there is always the boss of the boss of the boss, all the way to God, while at the same time no one ever takes responsibility for anything. The layoff scenes are chilling in their use of proxies and euphemisms to soften the cruelty of being fired, and the uneasy camaraderie at such a poisonous work environment seems quite authentic. If only it had been directed by Sidney Lumet. He would have brought the genuine human messiness that this schematic movie lacks.

On DVD: Network

A truly prophetic movie about the debasement of popular entertainment and the noxious influence of TV, Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, is so timely right now that it should be required viewing for anyone who "is mad as hell and cannot take it anymore", which is pretty much everyone these days. Watching it, I had an epiphany. If we were to revisit the great American films of the seventies, we could just watch them and pretend that the downward spiral to moronic, corporate, hellish Hollywood movies never happened. There are so many good ones, we wouldn't miss a thing. They are newer, fresher, more brave and more original than anything we watch today. They are still surprising. In fact, they are surprising because they are so brazen, so free, so unencumbered by accountants and lawyers. I could not believe that MGM, a major studio, financed and distributed this movie, which basically spends two hours heaping damnation on companies like MGM. Network is sharp, and angry and it is basically Chayefsky's cri de coeur, his personal diatribe. It is theatrical, full of lengthy speeches, some of them the best expository writing in film; it is a freaking rant, is what it is. It stings and it bites and it warms the heart with divine vitriol and, as every Sidney Lumet movie, it is alive and crackling with energy. Lumet is the greatest master at casting character and background roles. Every person in Network is perfect.
I saw Network at the Plaza Satélite cinema with my friend Lani when were were about 15 or 16 years old. It rattled me, but I did not understand it. I thought it was over the top. I did not understand why Faye Dunaway would seduce an old man like William Holden or why that had anything to do with the story (three cheers for the loss of innocence!). I thought it was grossly exaggerated and bitter. I resented that it wanted to punish those of us who actually loved watching TV. Who the fuck did this movie think it was? There was something in its crankiness that I felt was valuable, I just did not now exactly why.  But that is the beauty of revisiting the classics. You get a chance to redeem yourself.
The miracle of Network is that it is even more relevant today than it was when it was made. I imagine that this movie will never lose its prophetic powers, because things can and will only get worse. What seemed then an unhinged, crazy idea for a news show, with anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) sharing the stage with a fortune teller and God knows who else, is not out of touch with the total debasement of the news today. Diana envisions a show about domestic terrorists who film their own attacks, which is totally prescient, not only about reality shows, but about people using cameras to document their every fart. There is a great scene where the network's army of lawyers are reading the contract for a TV show with a communist leader and the leader of some guerrilla group who are supposed to star in it. Both communism and the guerrilla pretty much go out the window at the mere mention of who's gonna make what money.
Five actors got Oscar nominations for this movie. But first let me say that having William Holden and Peter Finch in the same frame is, for film buffs, the equivalent of the 72 virgins in paradise for other people. You just can't believe you are lucky enough to be experiencing these two charismatic, masculine, awesome movie stars and great actors together at once. Finch won the Oscar, for his is the showier part, although Holden just kills, as Max Schumacher, a seasoned news producer, a relatively decent man, caught in the ratings frenzy, swept aside by younger, greedier, more ruthless people. Holden devastates. I miss him horribly.
The fabulous Ned Beatty plays a corporate titan and was nominated for one amazing speech in which he basically says there is no democracy and there is no America, there is only IBM, and ABC, etc. Only corporations rule. Beatrice Straight, won the best supporting actress Oscar, also for one scene as Schumacher's wife. Faye Dunaway won an Oscar for her excellent work as flinty, driven network executive Diana Christensen. In the excellent commentary he provides in the DVD, Lumet says that when he first spoke to Dunaway about the script, he told her: "I know what you are going to tell me, that there is no vulnerability in this role. There is none and if you give her vulnerablitly, I'll make sure to cut it out of the movie." She said something like, "let's get to work". This is called cojones, and this is why I love and miss Sidney Lumet.
Lumet says that everybody spoke of Network as a satire, but that for him and Chayefsky, who both got their start on TV, everything in the movie is sheer reportage.
I believe him.
He also mentions that he has never been a director of comedy, although he has a great sense of humor. To me this is the key to the disturbing dissonance of this great movie. It is an extraordinarily biting satire, but it is not directed as such. It is served with as straight a face as possible, and Lumet amps up the drama, which makes it far more dangerous than if it had been treated tongue in cheek.
Some of the dialogue in this movie only Paddy Chayesfky could get away with. Characters explain at length who they are and why they do what they do, but the language is precise, lethal and delicious and it is just a joy to hear it. It also brims with truth.
So if you are feeling angry, there is nothing more satisfying than checking out this awesome, bilious film. 

On DVD: Dog Day Afternoon

Warning: You are about to read an unfettered, crazy mad rave about this movie, which I believe is a moral duty to see. There are spoilers ahead and I don't care.

As yesterday was the day gay marriage laws took effect in New York, what better tribute than this American masterpiece by Sidney Lumet, which is about everything: the Vietnam War, social injustice, powerlessness, sexual and racial politics, prejudice, love, loyalty and crowd control. This is the greatest movie about everything going wrong, and one of the greatest underdog movies ever.
I had not revisited this movie since I saw it in my teens, when by the end I was utterly bereft and crying like a banshee. Dog Day Afternoon is one of the saddest movies ever made. And it is about a bank robbery. It is very funny, taut and gorgeously well made. Lumet is the closest thing in American cinema to the Italian Neo-Realists. But since this is sort of a heist movie, it has a racing pulse too. Written by Frank Pierson, it is a masterpiece of tone.
Dog Day Afternoon is the quintessential New York movie, breathtaking in its spunk, its chutzpah and its humanity. Probably the best movie about New York, period. Forget about Woody Allen and his romantic, sanitized version of uptown. The opening sequence of Dog Day Afternoon with garbage strewn streets, the masses cooling off in Coney Island, 1970's New York in all its decay, is a true love poem to the grit of this town.
Everybody is incredible in this movie. Lumet was one of the greatest directors of actors. He had a gift for the authentic and watching his movies is like chomping on a great pastrami sandwich at Katz's, so spicy and juicy and satisfying.
The first time I saw it, I was so affected by John Cazale's performance as Sal, that I had forgotten that he barely speaks in the movie. His is one of the greatest silent performances in film. And when he opens his mouth, he is genius:
Sonny: "What country do you want to go to?"
Sal: "Wyoming".
According to Lumet, this was improvised. He claims that he burst out laughing so hard when he heard Cazale say it, that he was afraid he had ruined the take.
Charles Durning, as the police detective, is awesome. Chris Sarandon, as Leon, Sonny's (Al Pacino) "wife", super awesome (whatever happened to him?). The women and the manager at the bank, awesome. 
I love the spicy language, which is not just random, pointless profanity -- Lumet had the ear of a gifted rapper. I love the details: A policeman snickers when Leo is brought in to the command center. After many hours waiting the police munch on food.  The framing of tiny, bathrobed, Leo, hidden behind a policeman as he speaks to Sonny on the phone. The head teller who says matter of factly: "we are having a bank robbery". The girl who chews gum who seems to be thrilled to be part of it all. The way she plays with Sonny's rifle, feeling right at home in the company of the bank robbers. The crowd that cheers Sonny when he performs for them and throws money at them, but boos him and taunts him when they find out he's gay.
Pacino is unbelievable in this movie. If the people who hate him today (you know who you are) want a refresher on why he is one of the greatest American actors ever, they should see him in this.
What a character he creates. Sonny is a bit of a psycho and one of those people who has a knack for stirring up trouble. He is mercurial and somewhat delusional. He's a Vietnam Vet, and married to two people, a chubby loving wife and to Leon, who wants a sex change operation, which is the reason why Sonny robs the bank. But Sonny is like a human grenade of chaos. It's not evil chaos but the chaos of desperation. He has his ideas about justice, and he is not wrong, but he is also somewhat grandiose, goodhearted, but a loose cannon. Pacino is so expressive, he devastates just by using his eyes. He is funny and on fire when he works up the crowd, surprising even himself at their reaction ("Attica! Attica!"), enjoying his moment of glory when he has the police at his feet, for once in his life getting what he wants. But he breaks your heart in the scene where Leon is ungrateful and exhausted with him, and even more when he watches the hostages walk away without even looking at him one last time. You can see it in his eyes when he becomes conscious of the mess he is in. In one look there is an entire reckoning of his crazy, vain mistakes, of all the stupid shit he's done throughout his life. It is astounding.
As he says to his mother "I am a fuckup and an outcast". And so it is. A hero for all fuckups.

On Sidney Lumet

The first movie that made me cry hot tears of outraged indignation was The Hill, by Sidney Lumet, an incredibly intense film with Sean Connery about the mistreatment of British soldiers by their superiors in a disciplinary camp in WWII.
I was probably no more than 12 years of age and I watched it with my parents on TV.
By the end, I was inconsolable about the inhumanity these soldiers suffered. The fact that they were being humiliated and abused, not by the enemy but by their own leaders, was traumatic to me. I can vaguely remember my parents' proud amusement at my strong reaction to this film but indeed it gave me, probably for the first time in my life, a sense that the individual is very much alone in his fight against "the system", against insidious forces that strive to quash human dignity, often under the guise of what's best for us.

Some of the best films of the incomparable Sidney Lumet have this quality of moral outrage that, contrary to many other movies with pious and hypocritical moral pretensions, always feels totally genuine and genuinely indignant. Lumet's films have an energy, a zest, and a saltiness that makes them unforgettable. They don't go for easy targets like Nazis, or Russians, or exotic foreign enemies. Power, corruption, prejudice: he knows the enemy is within.
As I read in his obituary today about his frustration at not having won a best director Oscar for several movies that certainly deserved it (he was duly recognized with a honorary Oscar in 2005), I wondered if the reason for these slights was that, one, he was a quintessential New York filmmaker; his movies have the grit and moxie of New York in spades, something that those complacent cynics in LaLaLand may not wish to have rubbed in their faces. And two, he liked to pick fights with the system and vigorously stir the pot, making people uncomfortable about stuff that Americans are very smug about, like our judicial system, "we the people", the purity of our motives, etc. My recollections of his films are visceral and highly emotional.  I remember them as pulsing with an enormously generous energy, like life bursting at the seams.

My favorite movie of his is Dog Day Afternoon, which I also saw when I was very young. It has such an urban energy, with these two bumbling bank robbers, Al Pacino and John Cazale, both unforgettable, basically fighting with what seems to be the entire bureaucratic infrastructure of New York. Just to think about these two scrappy, clueless but spirited (and gay) fighters, brings tears to my eyes. The movie is funny, bracing, violent, and devastatingly heartbreaking. This is one of my favorite movies of all time.

I saw Network in my teens. I was impressed by the sheer force of it, and I guess dimly aware of its paranoid conspiratorial bent (understanding that corporations are not necessarily angelic requires a certain jadedness). But Network struck me as a very harsh movie. I felt like Paddy Chayefsky was angry at me. I felt I was being punished for being so naive. I remember it as being very abrasive, a touch hysterical even.
Serpico. Pacino again. One man's righteous indignation against corruption, right on.

I remember Running on Empty, with the young River Phoenix playing the son of Weather Underground-like anti-Vietnam war activists, as a beautiful movie. Who would make a movie like that today? Who would make Daniel, based on the E.L Doctorow novel about the Rosenbergs? With Lumet, you always know which side of the divide he's on.  
Lumet made other movies that were more purely entertaining, and he was as good at that as he was about stirring indignation. Deathtrap (an adaptation of a play by Ira Levin) was pretty cool and I loved Murder at The Orient Express because I was an avid Agatha Christie fan (at the age of 10). I remember the emotional rawness of Jane Fonda's performance as an alcoholic in The Morning After. Lumet inspired actors to do amazing work. He got them many nominations.

Of his recent movies, I strongly recommend Find Me Guilty with Vin Diesel, not driving a hot rod, for a change. A quintessential Lumet movie, with all his trademark spunk and unendurable heartbreak. His last film, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, didn't quite work, but it was wonderfully ornery. It had such a gritty urban authenticity in the character parts (always glorious character casting in his films), the Lumet bountiful affection for salt of the earth, rude New Yorkers, it was almost like a throwback to another era. Lumet's movies, whether perfect or flawed, never felt generic or paint by numbers. He made everything seem more authentic and more alive than it has any right to be.
Bless his spirit. It lives forever in his films.

Find Me Guilty

You would never catch me watching a film starring Vin Diesel, but I heard rumors that this one was different. For one, it is written and directed by Sidney Lumet and two, Vin Diesel plays a real life mobster called Jackie Di Norscio who is much older than him. He actually gives a performance, as opposed to just showing up in bulk. The mystery is, why him? Why have Vin Diesel get impressive hair prosthetics when you could get someone like Chazz Palmintieri or Harvey Keitel or James Woods, or even Al Pacino to play the role? It is a great role and Vin gives it his all, but he is too young for the part, makeup department heroics notwithstanding. His voice is right, his accent is right, his goombaness is right, but his age is wrong and it's distracting. His body still has the swagger of a young man. But he gets brownie points for trying.
Jackie DiNorscio apparently was a junior mobster who dealt drugs and did bad things and when DA Giuliani went out to get the mob, Di Norscio refused to rat out his friends. He served a long sentence in jail and in an extreme case of honor among thieves, fired his attorney and colorfully defended himself and his mobster friends in one of the biggest RICO cases in the history of New York.
This movie has an excellent cast: Alex Rocco, Linus Roache, Annabella Sciorra, Raul Esparza, Ron Silver, Peter Dinklage. Every single one of them is amazing.
Like the Sidney Lumet movie that it is, it wears its Noo Yawk authenticity beautifully. The dialogue sparkles with curse words. One thing you can say for Sidney Lumet, his movies have spunk. He gets spirited, dramatic performances out of his actors. In a similar spirit to his great Dog Day Afternoon, this is sort of a celebration of the underdog. Of course, this guy is no good, but somehow he has heart. He is sincere. And he is not a rat. He has the pluck and the street smarts to defend himself in court. The movie claims that most of the dialogue was taken from court transcripts. I can believe it. This trial was a circus that took almost two years. Lumet treats it wisely like a circus because it is essentially a court room drama. In his capable hands it is lots of fun, because the actors are a joy to watch. It's as if they know "we're stuck in a court room for two hours, so let's give em their money's worth". I was mentioning Alex Rocco because he plays Nick Calabrese as the best embodiment of a prick ever committed to celluloid. It is a killer performance. Peter Dinklage as the leading lawyer for the mob is also fantastic (did they indeed have a vertically challenged lawyer, I wonder?) Linus Roache, who is an Irish actor, does a stupendous job as the overzealous DA, and where the hell is Ron Silver anymore? Why aren't he and his sexy raspy voice in more movies?
In the end the movie is truly very sad. It's the history of a schmo, of a fall guy. Lumet does this incredible balancing act between the comedy, the drama and the pathos and I was deeply touched at the end, but it left me with a deep discomfort. This guy went through all that trouble to save people not only who did not deserve it, but who would not have done the same for him. The happy ending of this movie is so very sad I can't shake it. Check it out.

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

I enjoyed Sidney Lumet's 44th movie for its moxie and its cantankerousness, but it seems to me a very uneven film.
What is thoroughly enjoyable is Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who seems to be the only main character in the film who steadfastly refuses to ham it up. The whole thing is very acty, but he is excellent as a ruthless, cold bastard with major emotional issues. Now, I have, as always, a major issue with the reviewers in this country who have to tell you what the plot is about, thereby giving away its most important surprises. This really drives me nuts. Isn't it enough to say, "it's about a heist gone horribly wrong" and leave it at that. No, they have to spell everything out for you. Please, spare us the details. That way, when the twists come, we will not be expecting them already. But I digress. For the sake of the couple of readers who are presently living in a cave, it will suffice me to say that this film is about a heist gone wrong, and more to the point, about a bunch of utter fuckups. This movie, if anything, is a glorious exploration, well written by Kelly Masterson, of the human capacity for totally fucking up. Everybody in it is a world-class fuckup, or a loser, or deeply corrupt, and I am a sucker for misanthropy.
The other thing I really loved, is that it is an ornery movie. Sidney Lumet, bless him, still believes in the inherent rudeness of New Yorkers, even when the behavior in this town nowadays (at least during shopping hours) seems more suitable, alas, to Des Moines.
In his movie, however, receptionists are still salt of the earth, opinionated broads, and people behind desks ask customers to "pipe down", or "stick their neck" into a hospital room when they inquire for a patient. Service is of one of two types: rude or condescending, whether from a heroin dealer or the police department: nobody cares. Such curdled joie de vivre is exhilarating. As also is the use of great New York character actors. Brian F O'Byrne is hilariously Noo Yawk as one of the criminals, and interesting people like Lee Wilkof, Alice Spivak and Michael Shannon pepper up the screen. There is a wonderful scene between Ethan Hawke and his embittered ex-wife, (Amy Ryan), that just shows the nasty aftermath of a failed marriage. The bile and the hatred are as thick as molasses. Even Hawke's young daughter berates him. Such are the joys of this film. It holds as its central philosophy something that is dear to my heart: the world is a cesspool, stop dreaming.
Much of this movie is darkly funny, and it could almost be a nasty, dark little comedy if it wasn't for the overthetopness of it all. The chewing of the scenery doesn't correspond with the nature of the story. Less emoting may have made it both more chilling and more funny. Hawke is absolutely out of control as Hoffman's baby brother. His mugging is so extreme, it really distracts you from buying into the story, which is already a bit of a stretch to begin with. Marisa Tomei is sadly overused in a seemingly underwritten part. Amy Ryan is very good as a bitter ex-wife, and Albert Finney, well, he is a ham, but, like Mr. Ex-Enchilada used to say, he's a Westphalian Ham, (as opposed to an Oscar Mayer ham).
I found the ending super strained and hard to believe, over the top but without real weight.
Still, I raise my glass to Mr. Lumet, who drums up such raw energy with enviable vigor and zest.