Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Watched a movie last night called Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

It's a "best-laid plans" story that critics described as dark, fatalistic, and hard bitten. The screen writer's script is described as one that "drips with the kind of bitter world weariness that only comes with a lifetime of disappointment, family dysfunction and regret."

The movie is all of that.

I've been reading a ton of crime novels, thrillers, and espionage novels lately. Usually I mix it up, but right now it seems my brain needs a break. Pure entertainment.

In all of these stories, when the lives of ordinary people are discussed, they are described as empty, repetitive, close to pointless. Desperate.

Time and time again.

Poets do it, songwriters do it, authors of "literature" do it. Philosophers, drinkers, dreamers and criminals do it too.

Must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead captures every form of the suffering of the soul. There is violence, there is crime, but what did me in was the soul-deep unhappiness of almost every single character. Self-delusions, broken dreams, unrealistic plans for redemption, lying, cheating. An inability to recognize and cherish the beauty and salvation of family.

It captures life so honestly and so painfully. No glossing over.

It pulls back the curtain and hypocrisy of mantras like  "living your best life" to reveal the harsh truth of what life does to the best of intentions.