Mini-Finney-Fest

It's a good season to be an Albert Finney fan, as a new theatrical film and DVD release feature the 71-year-old British actor in two of his finest roles.

Criterion brings us director John Huston's 1984 film adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, with Finney starring as a British consul determined to drink himself to death in Mexico between world wars. Though Huston did some of his finest work in his twilight years (Fat City, The Dead), this, his third to last feature, can feel slow and labored. Like Finney's protagonist, the film often has trouble finding its feet, and screenwriter Guy Gallo is more than happy to point out the film's problems as he sees them in an accompanying audio interview. It's worth every minute, though, for Finney's one-of-a-kind performance, in which he isn't allowed one moment of sober screen time. It ranks, with John Heard's romantic-gone-sour in Cutter's Way, as one of the great drunk performances in film, and you have to imagine both Finney and Huston did an awful lot of mescal research, just as Lowry did before them. A bonus disc gives us an hour-long, on-set documentary, and Donald Brittain's Richard Burton-narrated, Oscar-nominated doc on Lowry, among other treats, which are as interesting as the feature itself.

Finney is drunk on grief in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Sidney Lumet's brutal, cynical crime drama. He's a supporting actor here, bewildered and angry due to familial loss and betrayal, but his performance stays with you as much as anything else in the film. Ethan Hawke holds up well, considering the company he's in, and Marisa Tomei takes full advantage of a rare turn as a slow-witted sex kitten, but this is Philip Seymour Hoffman's show, as he gives one of the creepiest, subtlest performances of his career. The film's violent resolution strains the otherwise-plausible, tough realism that had come before, but no matter — all the crime and punishment is merely a catalyst for the exploration of truly agonizing family dynamics that have been rotting away for decades.