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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Suffused with a sense of 9/11 loss, Spike Lee's overlooked "25th Hour" is the most emotionally wrenching film of the year.
Feb 19, 2003 | "But who can take a dream for truth?"
-- Robert Browning
Spike Lee can. Lee's latest film, "25th Hour," which got lost in the glut of prestige Christmas releases, climaxes with a dream that has so much emotional conviction, so much faith in the possibility of still being able to live a good life in America, that you'd have to be a complete cynic to think he's putting one over on us. The movie is both a lament for the chances at a good life that we -- individually and as a nation -- have let slide and a profession of thanks for the chances that still exist. And yet that thanks is couched in a profound awareness of fragility. That fragility is apparent in the shot that closes the credit sequence -- a view of the Manhattan skyline with the ghostly twin beams of light that emanated from ground zero six months after the attack. Never before has the city looked so stark, so impermanent against the nighttime sky, as if it were some magnificent set that had been erected for the camera and would be collapsed and put into storage when the director had the shot.
Sept. 11, 2001, is referred to directly only a few times in "25th Hour," and yet the entire movie is overshadowed by it. Nothing I've seen or read -- nothing -- understands what it felt like to live in New York City after Sept. 11 the way "25th Hour" does. By the time the movie gets to its closing line -- "This life came so close to not happening" -- those of us who lived in the city that fall are likely experiencing what we felt in our bones during those days, amazed that anyone got it on-screen with such uncanny accuracy. And maybe even more amazed that Lee was the one to do it.
I gave up even my professional interest in seeing Spike Lee movies some years back. I was sick of his racism (particularly toward Jews and Italians), sick of his misogyny (particularly toward white women), sick of getting clubbed over the noggin with his various harangues. As each movie was released and -- inevitably -- failed at the box office, you could count on Lee to blame that failure on the racism of Hollywood. Instead of the respectful, sometimes worshipful tone of the reviews he got, I longed for someone to confront Lee with the fact that black audiences weren't going to see his movies either. He had, as a friend of mine recently observed, become something like the black Woody Allen.
So I winced early on in "25th Hour" when Edward Norton, as the movie's hero, Monty Brogan, a drug dealer having his final day of freedom before beginning a seven-year prison sentence, goes into a monologue in which, one by one, he tells every ethnicity and class in New York to go fuck themselves. As Lee shoots it, it's an awfully showy sequence. Monty has stepped into a restaurant men's room to splash some water on his face, and sees "Fuck you!" written on the mirror. And he -- or rather his reflection in the mirror begins to riff, starting with "No, fuck you!" Lee cuts to fish-eye views of some of the stereotypes we've seen before in his movies -- hawk-nosed Jews, beady-eyed Korean deli owners, loudmouthed Bensonhurst goombahs. This time around, they're joined by other stereotypes, all shot with equal ugliness -- Upper East Side matrons stretched tight from rounds of plastic surgery, surly Sikh cabbies, Brighton Beach Russian mobsters, Chelsea gays, Master of the Universe Wall Street traders. At the beginning of the scene, I was certain Lee was up to his old tricks. Then I began shaking with laughter.
On the surface the scene is the oldest stand-up routine, Don Rickles working his way through every poor shlub who's paid money to be insulted by him. Except there's no grandstanding in Edward Norton's performance. But then, is there ever any grandstanding in an Edward Norton performance? Norton is one of the subtlest actors around, a guy who, as Pauline Kael once said of Gene Hackman, gets so fully immersed in his characters that he's always in danger of being underrated by having people say he's good. Even playing a drug dealer, Norton doesn't go in for the streetwise hood clichés.
Monty is a softie -- a businessman, not a muscleman. That's what has him terrified about his upcoming prison stretch. He's sure of himself when using the VIP entrance at glitzy clubs, or lounging in his spartan-chic bachelor apartment (his framed "Cool Hand Luke" poster tells you exactly where's he's gotten his notions of tough-guy cool). But he knows he'll be catnip for the tough cons he'll face behind bars. The goatee Monty wears is very touching. It gives Norton the boyishness of an adolescent trying to act hipper than he is.
