12 men, voluble, tired, not so angry

“Everything here is very Russian somehow,” muses one of the 12 in 12, Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov’s reconvening of 12 Angry Men in contemporary Moscow. The boy on trial for killing his father is now a Chechen and saddled with all the unfortunate baggage that entails. The jurors are still all men, though, as the truncated title implies, they’re not all that angry anymore. This is Russia, after all, and postwar American presumptuousness and obliviousness has been replaced by post-Soviet cynicism and fatigue. Even the lone initial holdout on the required unanimous decision of guilty bares only the vaguest hint of the righteousness, endurance and authority that characterized Henry Fonda’s character in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 sorta classic.

The ostensible Russianness of 12 is compounded by the film’s epic duration, which stays in session for well over an hour longer than its predecessor. Yet the gist of the story’s developments—the airing of racial or classist prejudices, the unearthing of negligent representation of the defendant, the revelation of personal agendas, the swaying of one juror after another—is remarkably faithful to the source material. What makes 12 so long, and what makes it at times feel longer, is a lot of overly elaborate choreography in the school gymnasium that serves as makeshift jury quarters; overlong, melodramatic digressions and tangents on the parts of nearly everyone present; ongoing cutaways to the defendant stoically waiting in his cell; and flashbacks to urban war zones to help us reflect on the sort of unforgiving world the kid comes from. All these elements seem designed to “open up” what was essentially a chamber piece playing out in real-time, but they really just sap the film’s urgency, distract from the issues at hand, and confuse the film’s sense of purpose.

Rather than focus on the ambiguities of justice and the looming threat of infection from reasonable doubts, 12 makes partial attempts to give the audience the trail the jurors never saw—the one the defendant deserved. But the evidence as displayed is wildly inconclusive. All that really matters, or should matter, is what happens in the room. The true tension arises from our inability to know anything more about what really happened than they jurors know, to gradually understand that uncertainty is inescapable, that even if the kid did kill his dad he cannot be lawfully convicted based on what the jurors have been able to glean during the trail.

Of the dozen performers, it’s interesting to note that the strongest, most welcome presence is that of the man quietly controlling everything, onscreen and off. Malhalkov himself plays the jury’s foreman, his large, round shoulders and philosopher’s beard rendering him a grounding force at the head of long table. His character holds a trump card close to this chest until the stretch, a tricky surprise alteration on the original film that’s a curious commentary on the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the Russian legal system and social mores, though it is finally of little consequence with regards to where our story finally falls.

Betrayal, rot, fake moustaches: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to celebrating our finest octogenarian filmmakers for their diversity (Alain Resnais), their grace and good humour (Robert Altman), or their steady commitment to a singular path (Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker). But when we turn out gaze to the latest work from Hollywood veteran Sidney Lumet, 83 as of last June, what’s finally most impressive, maybe astounding, is its sheer visceral, even ruthless vitality.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead marks a full half-century of filmmaking for Lumet, who debuted with 12 Angry Men before going onto helm a dizzying smorgasbord of features that includes The Pawnbroker (1964), Dog Day Afternoon (75), Network (76), Prince of the City (81), Running on Empty (88) and Q&A (90). That’s a sort of quickie greatest hits list, but there’s been plenty of stinkers too, the latest chain of them having started with A Stranger Among Us (92).

Taken at a glance, the catalogue seems to indicate longevity and restlessness above all, but a closer look reveals an ongoing interest in –and unusually deft hand with– themes of doomed ambition, perverse betrayal, and the underlying rot in modern American life. Concerning the plight of Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), two very different but mutually desperate brothers who collaborate on a robbery that goes horribly, grotesquely wrong, Before the Devil forges a new peak in Lumet’s oeuvre not only because it exudes the rigor of an artist half Lumet’s age, but because it is so very satisfying as a nasty, nasty, nasty little movie.

Working from Kelly Masterson’s script, which is narratively frazzled –there are more than a couple of plot holes, the consistent sleaziness feels rather overly schematic, and the finale arguably bites off more than it can chew– yet never less than riveting, Lumet has crafted a film that’s fascinatingly fractured on every level. Before the Devil features a family plagued by primal intentions only slightly better than the bad timing that undoes it. Formally, morally, thematically, the film’s fissures proliferate: the story darts elliptically through the chronological plot by use of disruptive flash cuts, while the compositions often isolate a body part in some evocative way, as with the hand of Gina (Marisa Tomei, excellent) in the opening post-coital scenes. The final result is a film that keeps us watching by continually jarring us.

Andy watches the bodies of he and his wife as they make love in a mirror, his expression quizzical, as though he can’t quite believe they belong to them. The body of a small-time hold-up artist flies through a plate-glass door while a laughably disguised Hank, his fake moustache a poor stab at manly authority, looks on in despair from the front seat of the getaway car. Lumet and his superb cast imbue scene after scene with alienating, often raw physicality, and Lumet suitably screw with the whole process by returning to certain key moments and filming them from a reverse angle, causing us to stop and think we’ve seen this one before… or have we?

I mentioned the frazzled nature of Masterson’s script: its fairly effective at diverting us from its inconsistencies, though at times it only manages this by prompting the characters into near hysterics. Thankfully, a hysterical Hoffman is far from the worst thing you could come across in a movie. His Andy is a ticking bomb that gets incrementally louder as things unravel. Hoffman builds the tension through a balance of Mephistophelian disaffection and hot-breathed indignation. He’s picky about when he boils over. Hawke, meanwhile, makes a satisfying counterpart, the designated baby of the family, he’s miserably naïve, always convincingly one fateful step behind his brother in his attempts to fend off disaster. Granted, these guys don’t look much like brothers, but they get the sick spirit of it all just right.

And maybe they get a helping hand from Albert Finney, who plays the initially unassuming role of their father Charles, who’s never privy to their conniving but makes it his business to understand it and act swiftly, all the while somehow embodying traits of both Hawk and Hoffman in his compellingly heavy, overheated performance. A little closer in age to Lumet himself, Finney is ultimately revealed as the grimy core of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a patriarch that moves from supreme grief to blistering wrath. And like Lumet, Finney might go a little over the top in his efforts to get this nihilistic little tale from one end to the other, but the point is he gets us there, on waves of cinematic adrenaline.