If you had only one day left to spend on Earth, what would you do? It's not the easiest question to answer, but a film like "The 25th Hour" allows viewers to see some other hapless perp suffer through the scenario - not that director Spike Lee makes the experience easy for both his doomed subject, drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), or the viewer.
Of course Monty isn't going to die, but he is going to Hell, which is his own assessment of the seven years of hard time he'll face in a correctional facility. He has a single day of freedom before he must turn himself in to the feds.
This makes "The 25th Hour" a funeral procession; amidst the backdrop of Terence Blanchard's elegiac film score, the audience follows Monty as he awkwardly tries to spend quality time with his girl, his chums, his father, the Russian mafia and his dog. But Lee never lets you forget that Monty's freedom is winding down.
Take this scene, which shows the shifting negative mood of the film. Monty's friends, brash Wall Street investor Frank (Barry Pepper) and awkward, dirty-old-man prep school teacher Jake (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are having dinner. Frank says that among men, girls rate him in the "99th percentile" because, he tells Jake coolly, "I happened to be blessed with a very big dick."
The audience chuckles a little, but Frank lets them down a few moments later by bringing a feeling of doom back into the picture.
"Monty's going to prison," Frank said, blankly. "He's a donut. Big, fat zero."
It's true that the impact of such moments depends on how much the viewer even cares about Monty. As an actor, Norton is hard not to like, even in some of his most nasty roles, such as the infamous "curbing" scene in "American History X."
The first scene that comes to mind involves Norton exercising his Caucasian rap skills in front of a mirror. Most will know it as the "F- you!" scene, which Lee also used in 1989's "Do the Right Thing." In response to viewing the aforementioned message scrawled on a bathroom mirror, Norton says "F- you!" to every ethnicity and social group within his home, New York City.
He may not have Eminem's emcee skills, but with rhymes cursing Koreans who don't speak English, the Upper East Side brothers ("Slavery ended 100 years ago. Move the f- on!"), Wall Street brokers and more, Norton's delivery is twice as venomous.
No one said Lee ever made feel-good movies. But the best way he provokes audience's emotions is with his upfront display of a fallen FDNY fire fighters memorial, the ubiquitous American flags, and a Manhattan skyline that displays Tribute in Light, the memorial beams filling the void left by the fall of the World Trade Center.
Reality hits you as soon as you see the skyline: Lee has directed the first film that confronts the Sept. 11 attacks head-on. It's a contrast to all the films released following the attacks. Previous movies dealing with the subject exhibited a vein of unreality, with characters walking about the streets of Manhattan as if nothing ever happened, although a flag or two is thrown in for show.
In "The 25th Hour," it's a real issue. In one carefully shot sequence, Jake converses with Frank in his high-rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero. Despite warnings of the unhealthy air, Frank refuses to vacate, saying, "Tell you what. Bin Laden can drop another one. I ain't moving."
It is this kind of determination that drives a guy like Frank - played confidently by Pepper - to bemoan Monty's fate, but at the same time blame his friend for digging his own hole and cashing in on "the misery of other people."
If "Do the Right Thing" told viewers to "fight the power," "The 25th Hour" shows what happens when people feel powerless. Under the spell of a post-Sept. 11 funk, the characters in the film pathetically attempt to fight their own problems and insecurities.
Part of "The 25th Hour" dawdles in a mystery plot in which Monty worries whether or not his young girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), was the snitch. It is kind of silly and extraneous, but maybe that's the point.
The same applies for the odd story involving Jake's attempt to fight temptation from his underage student Mary (Anna Paquin), a walking piece of jailbait. As the poster boy of sexual frustration, Hoffman's portrayal is funny, but sad. It is a little battle that shows how ineffectual these characters feel and act. The entire cast does a great job at showing it.
"The 25th Hour" is a movie without heroes. Instead, the cast of imperfect characters wades through Lee's movie assiduously. Many moments are punctuated by comic relief, so the film is not a bear to sit through. But for Lee, "The 25th Hour" is not a way for a person to escape their concerns.
