Culture > January 17, 2003

Truth and Consequences

By Joshua Rothkopf

Spike Lee’s latest—his 20th feature including TV work—is at long last the raging masterpiece many have suspected him capable of. 25th Hour eclipses everything he’s done before, including Do the Right Thing, in terms of its insight into the violence wrecking the boroughs and, provocatively, the skyline of his beloved city. (It delivers on the hopes held for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York—a crucible of ample heat but little light.) One doesn’t arrive at filmmaking of this caliber, a modern tale of crime, punishment and the new terror from above, from years of playing it safe: Lee’s hotheadedness has finally matured into a kind of mournful resiliency that no other American director can touch.
To describe the movie as a story about a convicted drug dealer’s last day of freedom is both completely accurate and utterly insufficient; it may nonetheless be the best way to start. Monty Brogan (Edward Norton, never as fierce with such gravity) walks his dog along the East River; a deceptive prologue sets him up as a savior to this animal, but it’s soon obvious he has little love for anything else. A ravaged junkie approaches him for a score, only to be rudely dismissed by his devil god: “I got touched—I’m over.”
It’s not exactly a confession; Monty spits out the words like he’s got all the time in world. He visits his old high school, his father’s bar. Later that night, his false friends gather in a nightclub to raise a bitter glass and privately tear themselves apart for not saving Monty from himself.
Such are the events of David Benioff’s tight little novel, first published in January 2001 and written in the casually caustic, hyperverbal style so immediately associated with New York’s mean streets. On the page, it seems a perfect if slightly unadventurous fit for Lee—another Clockers or Summer of Sam. But something new has been injected into the film version (adapted by Benioff himself); you can see it in the American flags dotting the brownstones and Lee’s breathtaking title sequence, the twin shafts of blue light extending into the night sky. (The wailing vocalist on Terence Blanchard’s score expresses almost unspeakable sorrow.) The city has changed for firefighters and drug dealers alike. And if redemption was never an option for Monty, going out in his unrepentant blaze, Lee now elevates the drama to high political tragedy.
———————
September 11 is a subject that demands the attention of our greatest filmmakers, especially the New Yorkers—frankly, I expect it of them. But I won’t be surprised if their “answers” are less audacious that those of 25th Hour, which suggest both complicity and helplessness in the face of irrational hatred. One quietly devastating scene has two of Monty’s oldest friends, a shy private school teacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a reptilian stockbroker (the revelatory Barry Pepper) arguing about his fate in a downtown apartment overlooking ghostly Ground Zero. Lee holds on the shot as they discuss consequences, inevitabilities, their own inability to confront the truth. But Lee is too smart to simply imply that America, like Monty, had it coming; the gaping hole behind them is not Monty’s impending jail time, it’s Monty himself—a hole hollowed out by hate with nothing left behind but tracks.
This is dangerous, uncharted ground; can it be that Lee was born to take the first stab? The script gives Monty a bilious monologue, an instant classic: Boring into a bathroom mirror, he swears at the whole of New York—the Korean grocers, the uppity Wall Streeters, the hot-shit blacks who never pass the ball on the court. It’s amazing to me how thoroughly this montage is being misinterpreted by critics as an ironic love letter to the city; it’s really just as vitriolic as any that bin Laden might spew. Contempt is a daring idea to build a character around, much less a whole movie, and you thrill to Norton’s hyperactive rant, his attitude. But crucially, Monty never regrets dealing, only getting caught; he’s still a bastard. And Lee’s shift of sympathies to those suffering around Monty is complete.
25th Hour comes to rest on a heartbreaking coda—Monty’s Irish father (Brian Cox) desperately dreaming an alternate future for his ruined son, a daring escape into anonymity and reinvention on the lam. It’s both a heavenly fantasy and a joke. He could never live in Texas; he’s a New Yorker, a drug dealer, a hater. So he goes to jail, just as the work continues at Ground Zero and the city slowly rebuilds. And New York, in all its brutal honesty, will continue to be hated by those who envy its forthrightness. Miss this film at your own risk—you will not hear these ideas from the people in charge.

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• Reader Comments

  thought you might want to read this very positive review of the 25th hour. 

  Posted by Rae on Feb 7, 2003 at 2:16 PM

  Wow, did we see the same film?  A “raging masterpiece”?  Sounds like you took one too many film appreciation courses.  Lee’s movie, while featuring characteristically sharp and provocative dialogue, also reveals a complete black hole of confused themes.  Yeah, there’s all the reflection on the wages of sin, the opportunism and selfishness behind many friendships, etc., but nothing we don’t already get ad nauseum from moralizers of school and church.  Monty is a bigot and a jerk, and his friends creepy hypocrites, so what?  Not all that much more to say, so Lee relies on montage and backdrop to make points, few of which go beyond gentle reminders that we should all get along.

  And as for allusions to 9/11, the only thing I saw was a superficial patriotism, symbolized by frequent shots of the flag, suggesting a darker theme—the resiliency of the American spirit in the face of foreign attack AND domestic failures.  Considering what’s coming in Iraq, this is hardly a progressive point to make.

  Posted by Peter Anestos on Feb 11, 2003 at 6:22 PM

  Take note Mr. Scorsese:
  Truly great filmmaking no longer relies on the cheap,gawdy,derivative,gratuitous exploitation/tabloidization of both art and history(gangs of new york).
  That’s why Spike Lee is daring enough and great enough to speak to realism without hiding behind some pathetic distorton of history.
  25th Hour is the best film of the year.

  Posted by Max Lumas on Feb 13, 2003 at 7:25 AM

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