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25th Hour
***
Cinema
Reviews - Week of May 2, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
135 minutes. Directed by Spike Lee. Written by David Benioff; based on his
novel. Starring Edward Norton, Rosario Dawson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anna
Paquin, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, Tony Siragusa, Levani Outchaneichvili, Tony
Devon, Misha Kuznetsov, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Michael
Genet.
Music plays all through the films of Spike Lee.
Their scores hover and sometimes grandly rise in scenes that other directors
would leave silent. The effect is strange, with the rhythms of our responses
sort of thrown off balance. It's not exactly operatic, it's not exactly soupy,
sometimes it works, and other times it doesn't.
It's a perfect technique for "25th
Hour". The music needs to hang around like a haunting presence rather
than blast open at the big emotional moments. Most movies are about whether
the hero will win or lose. In this one, he's blown it from the start. Edward
Norton plays a drug dealer named Monty Brogan, who has been sentenced to
seven years and has one last day before beginning the time. Instead of the
story being about what has changed from the beginning to the end, it's about
a feeling of clutching at nothing, knowing that everything has been screwed
up and having that specific sort of stressed sensation that comes about when
you're in a situation that sucks but simply cannot be changed.
The movie is based on a novel by David Benioff,
who also wrote the screenplay, and it meanders with Norton throughout this
weird day, a landmark in his life that doesn't feel declarative so much as
a terrifying limbo. He mopes. He spends time with his girlfriend (Rosario
Dawson) and his dad (Brian Cox). He has a "Do the Right Thing" sort of rant
into his mirror expressing disgust at everyone in New York, and then decides
that, no, it's himself who is to blame, because he had everything, and he
threw it away. At night, he goes to a club with the two best friends of his
former life -- one of them a stockbroker (Barry Pepper), the other an English
teacher (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). You'd expect Pepper to be full of slick
and empty platitudes and Hoffman to have the wisdom of the greats at his
lips. But as the evening progresses, it's Pepper who gets emotional and Hoffman
who is stuck in his own sick soap opera, dangerously attracted to one of
his students. The answers are never where you expect, if anywhere at
all.
There isn't really a message to the movie, but
it's a good dramatic idea, played well. At the head of a terrific cast, Norton
is interesting in the role of a big time drug dealer -- he can play villains,
but isn't doing that here, and makes Monty a guy of straightforward common
sense whose life doesn't seem to match his words. Lee surrounds him with
a showcase of the techniques he has been experimenting with in the last decade
of his work, like the seemingly constant music, grainy and overexposed
photography, and jump cuts and odd angles in moments where they don't seem
necessary. "25th Hour" is about a day where nobody quite knows how the moments
are supposed to feel; its fabric and tone are not all that different from
"He Got Game", the Lee movie where Denzel Washington just got out of prison
and hoped to patch up things with his son, but I think this one is better,
because its techniques ring true instead of feeling like an annoying collection
of frills, and it revolves around one tragic character instead of two uncertain
ones.
One thing about "25th Hour" that other reviewers
have made a big and whiney deal about is the fact that there are references
to September 11 and its aftermath. One scene has Cox talking about the trauma
of his firefighter buddies, another shows Pepper looking out of his apartment
window and musing on the wreckage of Ground Zero, and there's a dreamy final
sequence that regards the inhabitants of New York with love as Norton ponders
the consequences of maybe escaping town. Sentimental and unnecessary, according
to the naysayers, but what I have to say about this stuff is pretty much
the same thing as Lee does: This is a movie about a guy who has lived in
New York all his life, and finds the feel of the city affecting his trains
of thought, whether he be in moments angry or humble. If a movie like that
ignored the impact of 9/11 on the way the city has been feeling, talking
and looking, how would it make any sense?
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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