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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Those fears pull like a weight in the center of your chest in the scenes between Norton and Dawson. Even when Monty refuses Naturelle's request to join her in the bathtub, you still feel the enormous tenderness between them. Yet that tenderness remains largely unspoken, because to admit it would be to open themselves up to the pain that their coming separation will mean. In "25th Hour" we are in a world where people are connected by their shared proximity to an event and yet always tempted to retreat into isolation. Isolation may be the price they pay for being able to get out of bed in the morning, to walk the dog or buy a paper. The need to connect is side by side here with the vulnerability that connecting leaves them open to.
"25th Hour" is, on the surface, a tale of how men deal with their emotions by denying them, tamping them down. The heart of the movie is what roils beneath the surface, the story of people struggling to find words to give weight and shape to an event that seems unimaginable and a future that offers no comfort, and no certainties, neither good nor bad. In one scene Pepper, whose character is a hotshot Wall Street trader, and Hoffman meet up in Pepper's swank high-rise apartment. They treat each other with the forced bonhomie of formerly close friends who grew apart long ago, trying to pretend their connection is as strong as ever.
As they talk the two of them make their way to the apartment's picture window, and suddenly we're looking with them down on the emptiness of ground zero. The images that cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto gives us are simple, even banal images, ones we saw on the news over and over again. A man stands raking the dirt. A dump truck rolls up the highway, like thousands before and after it, on the way to the landfill where the debris of the twin towers was collected. Maybe because the surrounding darkness throws the workers, the truck and the site itself into relief, it feels as if we are seeing those images for the first time. They are profoundly ambiguous images. Why is that man raking dirt? The task feels both futile and necessary. Prieto's images are the simplest means of conveying how these people, and by extension the people who died there, are dwarfed by the immensity of the event. But they also convey sheer human persistence in the face of that immensity.
All the oblique, implied meanings of "25th Hour" come together in the final sequence (and as a warning to those of you who haven't seen it, there's no way to discuss this without giving away the ending of the movie). Monty's father has come to his son's apartment to drive him to prison. Along the way he offers to help his son escape, to drive west and just keep going. Suddenly, we've left the Henry Hudson Parkway and are driving on two-lane Midwest highways and then through desert towns. Cox's voice takes over on the soundtrack, the soothing voice of a father telling his grown son that things can still be all right, talking to his son like an adult but with the fierce protective instinct parents feel for their newborn.
He tells Monty that he can choose one of those desert towns, get a new identity and a job. As he talks, we see father and son stopping off for a beer in some nameless bar. Then Monty is alone, having his photo surreptitiously taken by an old desert rat who makes his living forging I.D.s. The guy must have a hundred piercings in his face. He's only on-screen for a minute but you look at him, wondering, "What's this guy's story?" You realize that, like Monty, he's come there to escape something and to start a new life. Maybe he's making money by extending to his customers the same freedom he found. We see Monty at work behind the bar of a small-town tavern, a welcoming face to his regulars and a good guy to his co-workers. We see something like gratitude in Norton's face. This may not be the life he imagined for himself, but it's a life he got to choose, and better than the one that awaited him in prison.
Monty's dad promises his son that after a few years he'll find a way to send Naturelle to him. Lee goes on to envision the couple's future, their life progressing surrounded by happy children and then grandchildren. The images follow one another so seamlessly that we feel as if the natural flow of a life were taking place on the screen. They seem less to have been imagined than to have been found -- as if this life were waiting for any of us to find.
We know, of course, even as we want more than anything to believe it, that it's a dream. Sooner or later, we'll be back with Monty, in his dad's car, on the way to prison. But the preternatural familiarity of the imagery won't go away. Even if we've never been there, we've seen these places before, towns where everyone knows each other at the local bar, where the Greyhound still stops in the center of town. We've seen them in WPA photographs, or maybe in our family albums. It's our collective dream of the American past, what Don Henley, in his song "The End of the Innocence," called "that same small town in each of us." But who knew that same small town existed in Spike Lee?
