If there were any small town inside Spike Lee, it was never anything bigger than a block in Brooklyn. At times, he has seemed not only the most divisive American filmmaker, but also the most cloistered. He may have been working in a different neighborhood than Woody Allen, but like Allen he has always seemed like a New Yorker content never to leave his own neighborhood. Were Lee ever to have depicted a small town in one of his movies before, it would probably have been as a place where someone like him was not welcome.

After all, no outsiders were welcome in the communities he put on-screen. You didn't need to be an Italian-American or a Korean immigrant operating a business in an African-American neighborhood (as in "Do the Right Thing") or a shylock running a jazz club (as in "Mo' Better Blues") to be made to feel like an intruder, a usurper. You could simply be a white guy who had moved into the neighborhood wearing a Larry Bird T-shirt (John Savage in "Do the Right Thing"), or the white she-devil that dares to destroy the sanctity of the black family (Annabella Sciorra in "Jungle Fever"). If you were Spike Lee, you could get away with what would have been labeled racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic in any other filmmaker's work. You could get away with it because you were an authentic voice of rage or oppression or whatever signifier you care to put in that sentence.

If there's one way to gauge Lee's achievement in "25th Hour," to measure the sheer generosity of the film, it's simply this: He knows that all bets are off and that falling back on the old ways of thinking about the world will no longer suffice. Lee has had the bravery to make a movie in which he realizes that his most cherished preconceptions are no longer adequate, and in which he disdains the divisiveness of his previous work. To give just the smallest example: the affection that exists between Monty's Irish dad and his Puerto Rican girlfriend and the dad's refusal to listen when people around Monty try to tell him that Naturelle was the one who turned Monty in. In "25th Hour" Lee is, for the first time, thinking outside his block.

Lee is affirming that the vision of America that ends the film, an America that may exist only in our shared iconic memory, is part of him, too. He films battered main streets with peeling clapboard on each building, signs painted on the sides of buildings decades ago that are still visible after years of being exposed to the elements. Informing this all are people who, like the beaten-up buildings in these old towns, refuse to fade away. It's a mixture of races Lee shows us, maybe more of a mixture than we would find in these rural towns. That, too, is the point: The life he is showing us has room for everyone. It's a promise that's still open, with the potential for grace or camaraderie or simple kindness, with the possibility of a future.

The promise this vision of America offers -- no less than the chance at a life we can still be proud of -- not just to Monty but to Lee and to us, is too real. It is too keenly felt to be a fake, although it is no longer a certainty.

By the time "25th Hour" reaches its climax, it's clear that Lee is trying to grab as much of his city and as much of his country in his embrace as he can. He also expands his embrace to include people he has never previously considered, and he holds on for as long as film runs through his camera, or through the projector on the screen in front of us. It's the rough, loving embrace you give someone you have no idea if you'll ever see again.

Will this generosity continue to flourish in Spike Lee? It's impossible to say. But whether it does or not won't diminish the fact that Lee has worked with an honesty of feeling equal to his subject that many more celebrated thinkers have refused.

Writing an open letter to President John F. Kennedy in early 1963, a few months after the end of the Cuban missile crisis, Norman Mailer raised the question of a Look magazine report about the underground bomb shelters in Virginia and Maryland where the president and his Cabinet could retreat in case of attack. What about Kennedy's family, Mailer wondered?

Mailer went on to propose a solution that would assure us the president himself had something to lose if he were to push the button. "Why not send us a hostage?" Mailer asked. "Why not let us have Jacqueline Kennedy?" A president faced with the possibility of loss, Mailer reasoned, would tell us he was "ready to suffer as we suffer, and that the weakness we feel before war is not merely our own pathetic inability to stare into the mountain passes of Heaven, the stench of Hell ... but is the impotence of men who would be brave, and yet must look at the children they have become powerless to protect." In "25th Hour" Spike Lee has given us himself as a hostage.

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