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Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Role: Gina
Release: 2007
Director: Sydney Lumet
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman
- Tagline: No one was supposed to get hurt.
Needing extra cash, two brothers conspire to pull off the perfect, victimless crime. No guns, no violence, no problem. But when an accomplice ignores the rules and crosses the line, his actions trigger a series of events in which no one is left unscathed.
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Facts & Trivia
- The title comes from an Irish toast: “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”
- Lumet made the decision to shoot Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead on high definition video after experimenting with the format on the TV series, 100 Centre Street. At a press conference at the 2007 New York Film Festival, Lumet called shooting on film “a pain in the ass,” and predicted that as soon as distributors and exhibitors can agree on a digital projection format, celluloid will be rendered obsolete.
- The film was shown October 12, 2007 at the New York Film Festival and opened in limited release the United States on October 26, 2007 in 2 theaters, grossing $73,837 its opening weekend.
- Marisa was filming Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Wild Hogs at the same time.
What Marisa says. . .
- regarding the nudity…
- “Well, it was very much something when I began in my 20s that if you wanted to be a respected actress that is something you didn’t do. And then I was surprised that it came up now at this point in my life,” she laughed. “I figured to do it now better than another 10 years from now, too.”
- “I felt fine when I was doing it, but there was no playback on the set so there was nothing for me to see. Sidney is such a class act that I had a feeling that he was watching out for me. I’m getting older; I guess I figured it was now or never. You could say it was the right director, the right time, the right body and the right age.”
What the critics say. . .
- Marisa Tomei plays Gina, Andy’s wife, and the nakedness of these three performers, literally and emotionally, makes for a bravura show throughout. There are other performances to esteem in Tomei’s career, such as “Unhook the Stars,” but anyone who sees “Before the Devil…” and says this woman is not a fine, forceful actress is willfully blind or mean. Lumet is also aware of how contrasting the eye-poppingly beautiful Tomei changes the way we look at the more-dowdy-than-usual Hoffman and champion scruff-bucket Hawke.
- Leave it to Lumet to cast the under-used, under-appreciated and always good Marisa Tomei as the sexpot sleeping with both brothers. It’s a daring part - she spends a lot of time naked, in a role with uncharacteristically harsh edges - but she and Lumet turn it into the kind of showcase that can make casting directors expand their notion of a “Marisa Tomei role.”
- And the two leads get vivid support from the rest of the expert cast. Marisa Tomei, in one of the most surprising performances of her 23-year career, plays Gina as a wounded low-rent beauty with both a heart and a hapless capacity for betrayal.