Philip Seymour Hoffman: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances...

5. Andy - Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

One of the more underrated movies in the Hoffman canon, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead has the distinction of being the last film helmed by legendary director Sidney Lumet - he of 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico fame - before he died a the age of 86. After a few years in the Hollywood wilderness Lumet returned to the sort of gritty, downbeat crime pictures he made his name on with this, the story of two hapless brothers who, finding themselves in a tight spot, decide to rob their own parents' jewellery store to get them some much-needed scratch. It's a tight, gripping drama that manages to be an effective drama about a dysfunctional family, a darkly comic look at a botched robbery in a similar vein to Dog Day Afternoon, and a heartbreaking tragedy about a bunch of messed up people. Principal amongst those messes is Hoffman's Andy Hanson a finance executive at a real estate firm in New York City who's been embezzling company money to pay for his burgeoning drug habit. In light of the actor's death the scenes of him shooting up are hard to take, but the real emotional gut punches come in his interactions with young brother Hank (played by Ethan Hawke) whom Andy tries to dominate and browbeat into following his cockamanie criminal plan. Both actors hold their own in a bunch of emotionally intense scenes (especially when Hank's long-time affair with Andy's wife, played by Marisa Tomei, comes out), but it's Hoffman who really wrings the truth out of them, making good on his assertion that "acting is torturous, and it's torturous because you know it's a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That€™s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great - well, that's absolutely torturous."