***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox, and Anna Paquin
Directed by Spike Lee & written by David Benioff, from his novel
2002 R
Dozen-or-so Best Films of 2002
On his worst days director Spike Lee is sometimes accused of being a heavy-handed, white-hating, secular sermonizer. This is a shame because, while he does have an agendum, so many of his movies are personal first and political second. Lee is a born filmmaker, and the difference between him and lesser directors is like the difference between William Faulkner and John Grisham: the second uses the medium to flatly express ideas, while the first has actual fun with the stuff of the medium itself. Lee is clearly more in love with his camera than with his soapbox.
My favorite Spike Lee-isms are his fantasy sequences. His most famous are in “Do the Right Thing,” in which neighborhood representatives of each ethnic group get right up in the camera and belt out all their secret hatreds for all the other ethnicities. Another terrific example is from “Clockers,” in which a detective played by Harvey Keitel walks a young suspect through a shooting, flying back and forth through time, through the suspect’s life as well as his own. “The 25th Hour” is a good movie elevated to near-greatness by two such sequences. The first is a soliloquy by the captured drug dealer (Edward Norton), addressed to every ethnic group in New York, then the city itself, then America’s enemies abroad, then the Church, and finally God, blaming all of them for his failings and his arrest, only to realize he has no one to blame but himself. The second is a heartbreaking narration by Norton’s father (Brian Cox) in which he fancifully describes how Norton could run from the law and start a new life. Criminals only get caught when they try to contact their old family, Cox explains, so you can never come back to New York. I had to blink back tears when Cox said he believes in God’s kingdom and knows he will see his son there, but if Norton runs away he is prepared to never see him again in this life.
It’s Norton’s last day as a free man before being sent up for seven years for drug dealing. The inevitability of his incarceration colors every moment of the film, so that it feels like a long third act in which everything that can be resolved was resolved before we even met the characters; even the mystery of who snitched on Norton feels only like a distraction to him, and “The 25th Hour’s” true focus is a study of regret, sin, and the craving for redemption. In a somewhat macabre act of loyalty, his two best friends (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) are treating him to one last night on the town. In his last hours, Norton has decided to square things away with his father, his friends, his superiors in the narcotic chain, and his girlfriend, for whom he harbors vague suspicions of betrayal. We learn how the couple met, how Norton bailed out his father’s bar with drug money when it was about to go under, and we see flashbacks of how Norton worked. He is a small man whose cunning got him where he is, but his cunning has run out. He dreads the rape he expects to suffer in prison, and he dreads his Russian overlord in the drug trade, who is a seriously frightening customer we are glad to meet only once.
An interesting counterpoint is made to Norton with his two friends Pepper and Hoffman. All three have been friends since high school, yet only Norton turned to crime. Pepper is a successful day-trader, who is a cutthroat in the business world, and unmerciful when it comes to Norton’s incarceration. He regrets not trying to get Norton out of narcotics, yet feels no sympathy for someone who has chosen a life of crime. Hoffman is a long-suffering high school English teacher, assailed by a beautiful student (Anna Paquin) demanding better grades, who fills him with lust and self-loathing. En route to Norton’s final party these two men have several interesting and revealing conversations about the predatory world of males when it comes to love, money, and the rules.
Lee tells the stories of these men with ferocious energy, so much so that when they are finally bathed in the loud music and flashing lights of the nightclub things feel calmer instead of more hectic. Maybe this is the point; maybe the frenetic style of the film is meant to reflect Norton’s turmoil, and only when he is in the sensory overload of the nightclub is he ably to push his doom out of his mind (at the nightclub, Lee also does a nice homage to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets;” see if you can spot it).
For a director so often accused of being preachy, “The 25th Hour” tells no obvious lesson. One point of view is that the three men are, at their cores, selfish; viewed through this lens Norton does not regret a life of crime, only not quitting while he was ahead, Hoffman does not repress his feelings for Paquin out of a sense of right-or-wrong, but only a dread of being caught, and Pepper is a big a scoundrel as Norton, but does so within the limits of the law. Even Paquin herself is no better than these men. She has a terrific scene in which she berates Hoffman for giving her a B instead of an A. I have to get good grades to get into college, she says. I want, I want, I want.
Much hullabaloo has been made over Lee’s usage of the crumbling remnants of the Twin Towers as a backdrop during “The 25th Hour.” I can’t think of the direct correlation between the terrorist attack and the story of these three greedy men with their strained loyalty. Maybe there is no directly-translatable symbolism that can be put into words, but the movie would not be complete without those charred remnants. Or maybe the symbolism is in Cox’s narration to his son, in which he foresees an aged Norton getting a second chance, and finally revealing to his children and grandchildren his secret, awful past, and how grateful they are that what came so close to not happening, happened. All this came so close—only a few city blocks—to not existing.
I haven’t gotten around to pinpointing Lee’s religious or spiritual leanings, but author David Benioff seems to have written the book from an Irish Catholic point of view, in which Norton, the sinner, if he is to accept responsibility for his actions, has no choice but to suffer damnation. He does not do anything to redeem himself by the end of the film, and he is not a particularly good man, but we come to like him, and yearn for mercy. “The 25th Hour” is not really about the world of narcotics—for that watch “Traffic”—but is a parable of sin and the craving for forgiveness. Cox’s picture of a second chance—of unearned grace, mercy, and redemption—is a powerful depiction of exactly how we would like to see God’s hand in our lives.
Finished February 16, 2003
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