This is my final post on the 45th New York Film Festival, which was a stellar showcase of new and established talent. As noted earlier, Eric Rohmer may have screened his last film at the festival. Another octogenarian, Sidney Lumet, screened a powerful new film, ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,’ that will likely not be his last film, judging by the vitality of the filmmaker and his love of the filmmaking process. ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ is Lumet at his finest. He has made a film that is so searingly unsentimental, you wonder how it ever got made (note: he’s Sidney Lumet).
The seeming ordinariness of the New York setting (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Westchester County) and the starkness of the story makes for a tense rollercoaster ride of a film. The film’s cast, populated by New York theatre veterans (including Oscar winners Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman), is outstanding and the scenes demonstrate the heavy rehearsal process for which Lumet is famous. The story, which involves a botched heist of a mom-and-pop jewelry store in Westchester, set up by brothers Andy and Hank Hanson, played respectively by Hoffman and Ethan Hawke (in a performance of a down-and-outer that is gripping to watch), is tightly unfolded in cut-backs with titles showing the sequence of events. That Andy and Hank set out to rob their parent’s jewelry store is a deeper issue, and the ultimate reason for the caper, concocted by Andy, is quietly revealed through his visits to a high-rise Manhattan drug den run by an androgynous, kimono-wearing dealer who looks like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. Hoffman’s portrayal of a controller at a Manhattan real estate firm who has been embezzling funds, only to hear of a pending I.R.S. audit, gives the film its taut timeline. He has four days to come up with the cash to cover the funds he’s illegally withdrawn. His life is such a shambles, with an unstable wife, played brilliantly by Tomei, who benefits only minimally from his corrupt dealings and finds herself in an illicit relationship with Hank (revealed in the opening scene).
The heist that is botched is almost laughable. Brian F. O’Byrne is hired by Hank to pull all the jewels and cash out of the store, after it opens, and run to the getaway car. Only in the minute prior to the actual act does Hank learn that his stick-up man actually does have a gun. The next scene is obvious: Hank’s mother exchanges shots with him and he is blown through the front window of the store. Hank clumsily drives away and has to back-pedal on the whole scene. The mother, played by Rosemary Harris, is finally terminated from her life support, while Hoffman plays the older son, struggling to maintain his composure as his botched caper melts down and his employer discovers his transgressions. Meanwhile, Hank struggles with the inevitable retribution from the wife of his slain accomplice, who enlists her heavy brother, played chillingly by Michael Shannon, to shake down Hank for $10,000. The two brothers, finally brought together by their final showdowns, agree to make a last-ditch stand to pay off the blackmail and get out of town Hawke’s Hank is a study in contrast; the “cuter” younger brother who is beyond on his child-support payments and is reviled by both his ex-wife and his daughter. Hawke’s performance as Hank is reminiscent of his bravura embodiment of Eddie, the Hollywood down-and-outer in David Rabe’s ‘Hurlyburly,’ which he played with searing force in a New York production in 2006. The father figure at the crux of the story is played by Albert Finney, whose gruff character hides the deeper secrets of his upwardly-mobile jeweler.
This is not Finney’s finest outing, by any means, and he seems oddly out of synch with the rest of this first-rate cast. His scene with Hoffman, played in the family’s outdoor patio, is fiery, and is one of many cut-backs that Lumet uses to piece together linear jumps and round out the narrative. This keyhole effect is put to excellent use in a film that has a loose, on-the-fly improvisational feel to it. Indeed, Lumet later discussed at the Q&A that some of the film’s sharpest moments came from improvised gems (notably, Andy asking Hank if “we’re cool now” during the shoot-out in the drug den). When Finney finally succumbs to deeper suspicions as to the motives behind the killer, he delves deeper into the darker side of his family and himself. An old Lower East Side jewel thief/fence provides him with the damning evidence of his eldest son’s machinations.
‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ is a day-time noir at its finest (Scorcese’s ‘The Departed’ is similar in this regard, although its night-time scenes are spectacular), with the ticking clock accelerating the lead characters’ downward spiral. The use of New York locations that are at once realistic as they are active in the story – and the use of time and space – is another marvel. You are sweating in your seat, feeling as implicated as anyone on screen, with impending doom around you (and, knowing how far it is from a crowded Manhattan to a major airport, feeling trapped). At the Q&A, Lumet was positive beaming at the success of the film, from a location standpoint, as well as its proof that high-definition filmmaking has arrived. The film was shot entirely in HD, which Lumet discussed at length, stating that – as a filmmaker – he only has to use 2 energy sources (electric and thermal) instead of 3 (electric, thermal, and chemical) in order to produce his work.
Lumet’s boyish glee at having simplified the production and post-production process was something to see; he was ever the independent, sounding as if he had beaten the studios and physics altogether at having used the latest digital filmmaking techniques. He talked about his legendary rehearsal process, which takes several weeks (in the case of ‘Devil,’ it was about 30 days). He was naturally deferential toward his cast, which he felt had captured the spirit of the film intensely. He was also delighted at having created a noirish thriller in which, he said, “not a single redeemable character graces the screen.”
‘Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” was a Saturday night highlight of the festival. Jon Landis’ valentine to the 81-year-old master of put-down humor is not to be missed. Screened by HBO during December, 2007 and on DVD, the film captures Rickles as a surviving monument to American entertainment in the post-war era. Rickles is a ubiquitous bit player in films that range from ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ to ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ (Landis was a gofer on the set of ‘Kelly’s Heroes,’ where he first met Rickles) and his comic act has endured a Las Vegas that has few surviving links to its heyday as the nightclub capital of the world. Indeed, Landis captures the demolition of the Stardust Hotel on film, site of one of Rickles’ latest gigs. Rickles’ fans and fellow travelers appear onscreen, from Bob Saget to Clint Eastwood to Richard Lewis to, hilariously, Robert DeNiro.
Landis has so much fun putting together an explication of how Don Rickles became such a beloved figure in an industry that thrives on back-stabbing, the infectious laughter spills over. Bob Newhart describes the seemingly incongruous friendship that he and Rickles have had (footage of he, Rickles, and their wives vacationing rolls under his dry recounts), and Joan Rivers appears in her Versailles-like apartment to detail her reminiscences of the early Rickles. Despite some of the cornier elements of Rickles’ schtick, his act (captured in 2006) is still in top shape. He appears on-camera for a good portion of the 89 minutes, delivering skewering imitations of everyone from his wife (whom he met while she was working for a Hollywood agency in the ‘60s) to Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable, with whom he worked on ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ (he says that Lancaster wanted him to “study submarines, understand what it means,” which he eye-rollingly ignored; Rickles engineered a gag in Gable’s trailer that involved him prancing around nude with another actor).
Vintage footage is everywhere in ‘Mr. Warmth;’ from an early Regis Philbin interview with Rickles (when Philbin was working in San Diego) to the predictable Dean Martin roasts and, most hilariously, a Johnny Carson walk-on to the set of ‘C.P.O. Sharkey’ (public disclosure: I was a huge fan of this short-lived series) in 1977, after Rickles had damaged one of Carson’s desk props. Paeans to Rickles abound; from Sarah Silverman to Penn Jillette to Steve Lawrence (who describes what the Vegas scene was like in the ‘60s, and how the business became a victim of its own success) and Keely Smith. ‘Mr. Warmth’ is perhaps the best historical review of the Las Vegas showbiz experience ever produced. Rickles, by all counts, is the survivor. Low-light shots of him being assisted to and from the stage are endearing; he is the last clown left standing, and his generosity of spirit could fill many films.
At the Q&A, Landis exhaustingly described the scenes that were cut or deleted, and this should make for a DVD out-take reel and then some. Rickles was magnanimous in his appearance; he wanted the party to continue all night (house management called the show around midnight). He begged Regis, in attendance, to come on stage. Fittingly, one of the questioners from the audience was an old high-school buddy of Rickles, who still works the Florida nightclub scene.
One of the real gems of the festival, ‘The Flight of the Red Balloon,’ is a touching tribute to ‘The Red Balloon’ in present-day Paris. Juliette Binoche’s Suzanne, a single mother with a son, balances her work as an actress in a puppetry theater, a landlord with an irresponsible tenant, and as mother to a daughter living in Brussels is an amazing character study. Director Hsiao-hsien Hou creates a Paris that is so stunning it does not seem real. Its eternal nature is emphasized by the ever-present red balloon, which frames a number of key scenes, and floats away in an arching shot at the film’s conclusion.
Closing night at the festival was the screening of ‘Persepolis,’ a stunning autobiographical work by Marjane Satrapi, which is an animated story of her life as an Iranian woman driven back and forth over three decades of strife in her country. As personal a film as has ever closed the festival, its ability to touch subjects not in regular discussion in the U.S. is remarkable. The young woman’s life prior to the Islamic Revolution, her alienated schooling in Vienna, and return to Tehran casts a long shadow on the terror of the Iran-Iraq war and the extremism that continues. Satrapi’s film benefits from excellent voice work, including that of Catherine Deneuve (she was at the curtain call for the film).
