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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Norton's likability, the fact that he's one of the few actors around whose eyes genuinely twinkle without turning him into a cutie-pie, is what gives the stream of invective its out-of-nowhere punch. Monty doesn't really mean what he's saying. Or, to be more accurate, he means it as much as any other New Yorker. And that's the kick of the scene. Monty's speech is a manic version of the free-floating hostility all of us in New York give in to when somebody in front of us on the sidewalk isn't moving fast enough, when some store owner treats us curtly, when some cabbie gets stuck in traffic, when somebody beats us to the only seat on a crowded subway train. The patience you have to have to live in such a crowded, noisy, abrasive city manifests itself in daily -- sometimes hourly -- bursts of impatience. And the worse the day we're having, the nastier our spiel gets.
Lee finds the common ground in this collective hostility by offering up Osama bin Laden as the last target of Monty's rant. We may all hate each other, Monty might be saying, but we all hate that cave-dwelling donkeyfucker. It's a good, nasty New York joke. But it feels like nothing, a cheap gag, compared to the real payoff to this sequence which, coming at the end of the movie, is its most emotionally overwhelming moment.
Ever since Sept. 11, we've heard news anchors and Op-Ed writers, cab drivers and people in the street all say, "Things will never be the same." Those words have sprung so glibly to so many lips that they prevent us from asking just how things will never be the same. Lee doesn't pretend to answer that question in terms of foreign policy or increased security measures. He's trying instead to get at how something so dire seeps into every bit of our existence, how the very texture of our lives soaks it up.
For me, Sept. 11 wells up in "25th Hour" in the sudden lost look that takes over each character's face; in the way the subject is broached so tentatively ("Any of those guys coming back in here?" Monty asks his dad, talking about the firemen who frequent the older man's Irish bar); in the loneliness that permeates even the movie's most intimate and loving encounters; in the invocation of the beauty and burden of what it meant to walk down a street and feel that you were connected to every person you passed, even if those were the people that, like Monty, you had been cursing a week before.
In William Gibson's new novel, "Pattern Recognition," a character whose father disappeared on Sept. 11 notes that, of all the hundreds of posters for the missing that were everywhere in the city, not one was posted on top of another one. It would have been unthinkable for that to happen. For a few weeks, the city seemed to expand its streets and avenues to make room for the dead as well as the living. The memory of the dead wasn't in the air; the dead were the air. There was nothing repugnant about that, certainly not in the way people talk about the stench of human remains at disaster sites. It seemed fitting that New Yorkers should be literally breathing the dead. We the living had become walking crypts.
There were fewer people than usual on the streets of New York in the fall of 2001, yet it took longer to get anywhere. Mostly because those "MISSING" posters (the word itself a choice of almost unbearable optimism) kept calling to you. The people on those posters, even more than the daily pictures of the dead that continued for months in the New York Times, were presences as real as the particles we all carried within us. You had to look at those posters, to acknowledge the fact of each person, if only for a second, before going on your way. There was no leaving them behind. The posters were speaking to us in a new language, not out of a false delicacy or tact but in an attempt to talk of awful things to people who had already been rubbed raw. When a poster for a missing young woman described her tattoo, you understood that the detail was there to aid in the identification of her remains.
That sense of needing to imprint everything on your mind before moving on, the idea of memory as a bulwark against loss, is the reason why the individual scenes feel elongated in "25th Hour." Lee's use of long takes with an unmoving camera, his willingness to let scenes unfold and give actors the time and space to feel their way through, gives the movie a persistent tentativeness. "25th Hour" follows Monty as he says his goodbyes to his dad (Brian Cox), his best friends (Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman), his girlfriend Naturelle (the wonderful Rosario Dawson), even Doyle, the abused dog he rescues at the start of the movie.
These goodbyes are taking place in a city where goodbye has become a way of life, where everything and everyone so familiar to us could be gone in a flash. Where, as the movie's final line says, "This life came so close to not happening." The encounters are more resigned than pained, full of awkward, gaping spaces. The characters here are watching every word they say, weighing them, painfully aware of their inadequacy. What do you say to someone in Monty's position -- what can he say to the people he's let down -- that wouldn't sound ridiculously false?
That's the connection being made between Monty's story (adapted by David Benioff from his novel) and Sept. 11. The movie is about human interaction thrown into relief by both the memory of disaster and the unknown disasters to come. Lee is asking how we continue to connect to the people we love in the face of fear, asking how we dare to believe in the future, even the chance of a future.
