We wound up at “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Sidney Lumet‘s new film, last night because we couldn’t get into “I’m Not There,” the multi-actor Bob Dylan film. We hadn’t done our usual homework on “Dead” so we didn’t have a clue what we were in for, except the class A list of actors: Phillip Seymour Hoffman (most memorably of “Capote”,) Ethan Hawke, Maria Tomei and Albert Finney. Looks like a go, we said.

Imagine our surprise when, without previews, without titles, without warning we were watching an overweight, naked white male plowing — at length, from the rear — what seemed to be a beautiful woman, or at least a woman with lots of beautiful hair. I have to say, it was a long scene. In part because I was trying to figure out how this well lit porn shot fit the movie I thought we’d paid to see. It ended in sweet hilarity, somewhat redeeming the man who, keep in mind we know nothing about yet, reserved half his amorous attention for the figures in the mirror. Somewhat. Their conversation lets us know that this loving, and the following sweetness, is unusual in their lives. It throws them back to the “old days,” the days they met. And it clues us to the financial pressures –so central to the rest of the film– that are squeezing “Andy” as he tries to live a life larger than even his sumptuous salary can maintain. The woman’s sudden withdrawal from happy coitus tell of her unhappiness at his day to day absence, emotional and physical.

After a dippy little subtitle –“The Day of the Robbery”– almost indicating we are watching a comedy, we are zipped into a little shopping corner as banal as can be found. The L of stores around mostly deserted asphalt, a UPS truck, an elderly man dropping his elderly wife off, a white sedan with two guys sitting in it, waiting for stores to open. The woman unlocks a door and goes into a store, takes off her coat, begins to settle herself. It’s a jewelry store. And suddenly the filmic dip from high sexual fever into banality explodes into threat and violence. One of the men in the car comes into the store, a mask pulled over his face and a big gun waving at the elderly woman. Lots of shouted orders. Frail responses. The tension is unbearable. And then hell breaks loose.

Lumet is no stranger to hell breaking loose. He’s a master at screwing up the tension between the bad and the good. In doing so he can usually be counted to be on the side of the good. Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Prince of the City, even Dog Day Afternoon –which he has described as showing that even the freaks in our lives are more like us than we can ever know. But something different is going on here. The “Devil” is a fast plunge into hell, with not too much redemption going on. The story is told in overlapping segments. We are moved back in time before the robbery as subtitles tell us “Two Days before the Robbery;” “One Week Before the Robbery.” We see new parts of the larger story connect to parts we’ve already seen, the same sequence of lines and actions repeated, now set into new contexts. Always we see the family — of men, the mother is dead and the sister is barely present — collapsing in on each other, wildly trying to leap over the previous mistake that had brought them to the present precarious position.

Hoffman is the older brother, the one we have seen in the opening scene, successful, aggressive, sure of himself but in trouble. His success is falling short of his needs. The falling short is driving him to drugs, impotence and financial chicanery. Hawke is the younger brother, the baby, the unambitious, the loser as he is called by his angry ex-wife and his disappointed daughter. Both brothers need money and they need it bad. When Hoffman — Andy — proposes a simple robbery to jump start their lives, Hawke — Hank — at first is incredulous, then resistant, then crazed by his need for money, acquiescent. Andy details the plan. Knock over their own parents’ jewelry store. They don’t work on Saturday and the old woman who does can be hustled into the back room. The jewels are covered by insurance. They stolen ones can be fenced. The old man, it turns out later, is no warm and nurturing dad. No harm, no foul. Everybody’s happy.

Hoffman is a genius at becoming the nasty, seductive older brother. Hawke a little less successful at being a chump but pretty damn good. Trouble is, he decides he can’t possibly pull the robbery off himself so he enlists the help of a real thug. A real thug with a real gun juiced by heavy metal music and pumped testosterone leads to certain mayhem. Perhaps he’s the only bad guy from the old Lumet world, to get what’s coming to him. All the rest live in a gray zone, some charm, some evil; men in the modern world caught up in their greed and bad decisions, the women not too helpful either. Maria Tomei, Andy’s thick haired wife we met in the opening scene, acts out her despair at Andy’s lack of emotional/sexual accomplishment –when not on vacation– by meeting Hank once a week for a good long nooner. It’s all a fuckin’ mess, as they say. So far from the sweet Irish toast from which the title comes ” May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead” that one imagines it was deliberately done. Meaning the opposite of what is intended.

So watching it, as I always do, I ask myself: why is this film being made? What is on the director’s mind? The writer’s? What is the story they want to tell and why do they think it important enough to spend several years in its making? Why this film and not another? For some, the only reason to make a film is because it looks like a cash machine. Story, purpose, not important except to draw ticket buyers. Lumet isn’t one of these guys. In most of his earlier films the question of “why this film?” is easy to answer. He is dealing with significant questions in life. He has stories to show us people and how they deal with the messiness and uncertainties of the world. He has hope. Without being simplistic he writes the good over the bad. The “Devil”?

The story spirals into a murderous tiny point –warning, Plot Spoiler — until the father kills his oldest son– in revenge for his wife’s death in part, but to rid himself of what he has spawned, a son who has never measured up. And we’re not sure why. Finney, the father portrays a stern, overbearing father. Andy, the eldest, rages against his childhood treatment. But details, Sidney, details? What happened between them beyond the easiest of cliche’s? What about the mother? What made Hank such a loser — hiding under rocks away from his domineering father and manipulative brother? Don’t know. Is it simply that Lumet is older and the world uglier than it was in his youth? Or uglier than he knew it was? But why spend the time and money to tell us this? Is this like a book of war photos — intended to tell us the benefits of peace by showing the ugliness?

Lumet has said in an interview or two that he was attracted by the melodrama, that melodramas don’t need the character building, that over the top acting and constant surprises are enough.

Maybe. But I’m not convinced. Is this just a story of an odd family, interesting to watch and feel removed from? A family odd, but polar opposite of say that of “Little Miss Sunshine?” Or is it a family meant to stand for something larger, something iconic in American life? Is it a companion piece to Cormac McCarthy’s/Coen Brothers equally bleak “No Country for Old Men?”?

No one else has commented on this so it may be a long shot. Lumet is 83. The father in the film is old, and beaten up. He is still driving a car, but semi retired. As a young man, we are told by one of the key minor characters in the film, a diamond cutter/fence, the father was a good cutter himself, on the mean streets where the fence still works. He grew up and out and created a decent life in the suburbs. Lumet himself grew up in the hard streets of New York where he fought his way through ethnic gangs and became one of the lords of fine cinema –a cutter as it were. And what does he see in his old age, of the craft of story telling and film making? What does he think of the drek in the theaters of American cinema? Is it a stretch to think that Sidney Lumet is projecting himself into the father of the film, putting an end to the son who turned out so bad?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s just the thrill of a good, taut story. Brotherly Greed in the great American reduction of money is all we need; from it flows everything.

But when I heard this morning that good, moral, people-devoted Senators and Representatives, some of them flying their religious flags high, had sat through CIA briefings in 2002 of “coercive interrogations” being used on men captured in distant lands, that water boarding and worse had been spoken of — and no one raised a voice against it — I thought perhaps Sidney Lumet had been more profound than he intended — giving us a story of our age as we go murdering each other to our last dying breaths.

So, the Devil knows what Lumet is up to. You won’t have wasted your time in seeing the film, filled with fine acting and Saturday night tension. I’m not sure the lesson we get is more than the great old British gallows song, “Sam Hall,” with it’s chorus of “You’re a bunch of fuckers all, god damn your eyes.”

For ourselves, we’ll be looking to get to the Dylan movie earlier next time and thrill to “Chimes of Freedom” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.”