After 50 Years, Still No Time For Cheap Sentiment

MOST directors do not go on to make one of their best films after receiving their lifetime achievement Oscars. But then, most directors do not have the near-legendary stamina and efficiency of Sidney Lumet, who accepted his honorary Academy Award two years ago, turned 83 in June and now has made 44 features in 50 years. (By his standards he has slowed down a little. For the first 40 years of his career he was averaging one movie a year.)

Sidney Lumet, who has been making movies for 50 years, in his Upper West Side office. His latest film is “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”

Mr. Lumets first feature, 12 Angry Men (1957), earned him an Oscar nomination for directing. His latest, a bracingly bleak crime melodrama called Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead (set to open Friday), has been upstaging filmmakers less than half his age on the festival circuit this fall.

In the years between, his remarkably varied résumé has matched quantity with quality and eluded easy classification. While slipping from one genre to another he has remained very much a New York filmmaker, not just in his preferred locations but also in his politics, his temperament and his work ethic.

This is a natural moment for retrospection, given Mr. Lumets age, the robustness of his latest film and the enduring relevance of his sizable body of work. Lumetian descendants abound on television (any number of procedural dramas) and at the multiplex (Michael Clayton, to name just one current movie). He recently participated in onstage conversations at film festivals in New York, Toronto and Deauville, France, and he is the subject of a tribute by the Museum of the Moving Image at TheTimesCenter in Manhattan on Thursday.

But while hes visibly pleased by the attention, he prefers to leave the reminiscing to others. Im sick of hearing myself talk, he said in a recent interview in his office on the Upper West Side. I dont know if people believe me, but I never rewatch my own movies.

Such modesty is in keeping with Mr. Lumets directorial personality. While his best films are by no means devoid of character — they often have a jabbing vigor, a convincing sense of messy urban life — there remains in his work a cumulative humility, a tacit insistence that style should emerge organically from narrative, and that the best technique is invisible. I hate any style if you can spot it, he said, adding that in most of his films, I dont think theres a visual style, because I try very hard to find the visual style that story needs.

If Mr. Lumet has a specialty, it is in depicting the workings of social institutions. He has made richly textured portraits of police culture and corruption (Serpico, 1973; Prince of the City, 1981; Q&A, 1990) and a series of gripping courtroom dramas, from 12 Angry Men to The Verdict (1982) to more recent work like 100 Centre Street (a 2001 TV series) and Find Me Guilty (2006).

Although he is a decade or two older than the major figures of the New Hollywood, he is often associated with that mythologized period, thanks to the consensus classics Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976). But his career is also full of rewarding tangents and byways, from the early theatrical adaptations (The Fugitive Kind, 1959; Long Days Journey Into Night, 1962) to the Reagan-era expressions of leftist frustration (Daniel, 1983; Running on Empty, 1988).

One thing that has stayed consistent is Mr. Lumets unsentimental streak, which has perhaps never been given fuller voice than in his new film. Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead, no ones idea of a gentle autumnal reverie, is an old mans film only in the sense that its maker is in effortless control of his craft and attacking the material with no inhibitions or apologies.

The movie complicates familiar noir dynamics by confining them to a domestic sphere. Two brothers — one a drug-addicted, status-obsessed executive (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the other a down-and-out divorced father (Ethan Hawke) — hatch a scheme as outlandish as it is desperate. Envisioning a victimless crime, they decide to hold up their parents strip-mall jewelry store, a plan that inevitably unravels, propelling the film into the realm of Oedipal tragedy.

Working from a script by Kelly Masterson, a first-time screenwriter, Mr. Lumet was careful to adhere to the rules of melodrama. In a well-written drama the story comes out of the characters, and in a well-written melodrama, the characters come out of the story, he said. The first obligation is to the story. Its something I warned the actors about. I said, Listen, I may need to ask you for a climax here that you may not feel, because the nature of the plot demands it.

Mr. Lumet said he revised the script. It was his idea to make the protagonists brothers, and he also added an opening scene, a sexually candid hotel-room idyll with Mr. Hoffman and Marisa Tomei that haunts the rest of the film. At a New York Film Festival press conference last month Mr. Lumet said hed had no contact with the screenwriter and referred — incorrectly — to Kelly Masterson as a woman. Mr. Masterson later sent him a note, Mr. Lumet said, pointing out that they met during the shoot.

I sent back a conciliatory note, he said. I told him I wouldnt remember if my mother was on the set. When Im working, Im there.

Unusually for a Lumet film Before the Devil darts back and forth in time to highlight the points of view of different characters. But true to form for Mr. Lumet it is also full of indelible, vanity-free performances and, perhaps not coincidentally, populated with theater actors, from Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Hawke (whom Mr. Lumet knew primarily from their stage roles) to Michael Shannon and Brian F. OByrne (doing razor-sharp character-actor work) to the veterans Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris (who play the parents).

Mr. Lumets track record with actors speaks for itself. He has guided 17 performers (including Al Pacino, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway and Ingrid Bergman) to Oscars or nominations. He was himself a child actor in the New York Yiddish theater and later a member of the fabled Group Theater. Most of the actors he has worked with, he said, feel like theyre in sympathetic hands but without being indulged.

He makes a point of not getting too personal. Elia Kazan used to really try to get inside the head and psyche of everybody he worked with, he said. Im the exact opposite school. I dont like to get involved. He added, And I try not to work with lunatics.

Mr. Lumet, who said he does not believe that overfamiliarity with the material can dampen an actors instincts, always insists on a rigorous rehearsal period (four weeks on the new film).

The rehearsal for this film was far more intense than the shoot, Mr. Hawke said in a recent telephone interview. Sidney knows how to create an environment where acting can thrive.

Still, Mr. Lumets reputation as an actors director, though accurate, has made it easy to overlook the subtle classicism and throwback efficiency of his technique, which he outlined in his congenial, common-sensical 1995 book, Making Movies, a memoir in the pragmatic guise of an instructional text. During rehearsals he is not merely fine-tuning the performances but also working out the cinematography.

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