Opening with something along the lines of a Tarantino gimmick and concluding with something of a Scorsese gimmick, Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, indeed, enthuses the usage of (astonishing if insubstantial) camera virtuosity as well as utilizes his contemporaries’ visions of cinema aesthetics but stands out as considerably more self-assured than any precursors (particularly in 2002.) Impossibly well-mounted, the film’s gorgeous camera work would seem to suggest an overt selection of tangible formalism and, quite so, Lee take some rather drastic storytelling methods of approach. But as commonly performed Lee’s skewed cinematic vision of transcending grittiness in urban landscapes rarely undermines David Benioff’s poetic tropes through which is funneled an unapologetic tale of madness and brotherhood. As overused as “unapologetic” is, the word appropriately illustrates the film’s acidic brutality, towards prison systems, racism, politics and relationships, and rants a long one in bitter, post-9/11 New York.
Starting with an anecdote about a high profile drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) and his dimwitted Russian accomplice (ex-football player Tony Siragusa) rescuing a wounded mutt (whose presence is vaguely familiar to Sam in Summer of Sam), the film’s tone is set as it is confirmed with subsequent title shots of the emblematic light fixtures manifesting the angry ghosts of the Twin Towers. In a post-9/11 Manhattan Monty wanders the streets with his faithful canine escort, morose we later learn from his seven year sentencing after a drug bust, perhaps on a tip from his girlfriend Naturelle Rivera (Rosario Dawson). One day shy of his impending imprisonment Monty confronts his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper) and Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his father (Brian Cox), Naturelle, his former drug associates, New York, and finally himself.
Resounding a proverbial blow with an intended anti-conclusion of ambiguity, 25th Hour shimmers past its anecdotal premise and ruminates the extinguish of a man, his surrounding links, and possibly his caustic milieu. Though Lee looks at this catastrophic downfall as the result of the oft traveled route of racial tension, he may be quite justified in this light. Lee even implements an early powerful sequence of universal loathing, bearing striking resemblance to the prominent scene in his Do the Right Thing, in which a distraught Monty glares into the mirror and offers a “fuck you” for nearly every racial group inhabiting the New York area as well as one for his friends and himself. Slinging these gibes, in particular, at Arabs (not to mention Osama Bin Laden), the mise-en-scène’s incorporation of 9/11 and Ground Zero awareness is perhaps among the film’s shortcomings. Though it may be considerably germane in a time when Hollywood curtains their immediate post-9/11 films with digital work, masking over the Twin Towers. However, malodorous of much less pro-American propaganda is 25th Hour than, say, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, still proving Lee as an independent, incidentally countering his predecessor’s grandiose misstep of late.
With such a superlative gust of cinematic bravura, 25th Hour boasts its twenty-four-hour chronicle (twenty-five counting the final scene) as a psychological yarn of study: in the stages before an imminent fate, recovery after colossal disaster, will against sexual urge (albeit the weakest part of the film), and accepting the demise of relationships. The predilections of man is very becoming in the urban doom opera and its fanciful rhythms, akin to elements from Lee’s past efforts (Do the Right Thing, Clockers, Summer of Sam all come to mind), yet engaging on its own and looking good nonetheless. And the performances concrete the emotional propinquity and acrimonious paradox harbored throughout its running, with the vital animation parallel to the excitement of simply discovering its roll call.
Never having lived in New York and only visited once, as of current, it is estimable when assured directors such as Lee (and including Scorsese, Woody Allen, Abel Ferrara, etc.) are so in tune with the love/hate aspect of the city and the fuelling cadence of its urbanization that a connection with its various facets and denizens gels the film experience with its human proximity and locale detail. 25th Hour is something of an allusion to the cinema of New York, conscious and subliminal, as both praise and condemnation of the city’s cutthroat infrastructure, compelling Lee’s sublime understanding for the duality of animosity. In its essence the fundamentals of human interaction on gorgeous display thrum in quintessential tragedy on Lee’s grimy tableaux binding and obscuring unity as per the tragedies. As dated as many of the discussed events may become for the film, the tragedy already hit New York and has forever shaken its components, the film justly feeling cinematic preservation pertinent. It is now about the way its victims retreat to their previous behavior that the new misery arises and perpetuates.