Spike Lee loves his city, but unlike most of his fellow New York filmmakers, Lee has always refrained from over-exaggerating the positive attributes of it. Through his carefully restrained camera, New York City seethes both with love and rage; Spike understands better than anyone that his hometown's true charm lies in its gritty reality. As one of the first films to live and breathe in post-Sept. 11 New York, 25th Hour serves as a brilliant tribute to a surviving metropolis.
But this atmosphere of a broken city is only the backdrop for Lee's compelling characters. His films have always drawn the big names, but never has a cast been more successful at setting a consistently riveting mood. Edward Norton took $500,000 (instead of his normal going-rate of $7 million) for the lead role of Monty Brogan, but as usual, his acting is priceless as he plays a drug dealer on his last night before going to jail for seven years. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper also shine as Jacob Elinsky, a private school teacher with an obsessive crush on one of his students (Anna Paquin), and Francis Xavier Slaughtery, a ruthless Wall Street stockbroker. These two are Monty's best friends, the guys he grew up with, and they are among the people whom Monty must make peace with before facing his prison sentence.
Ed Norton's great talent for emotional intensity is on display as he visits his father (Brain Cox) at the bar he owns on Staten Island, and as he struggles with the possibility that his girlfriend, Naturelle Riviera (Rosario Dawson), was the one who ratted him out to the police. David Benioff's screenplay from his own novel is so remarkably reserved that the film's few climaxes turn into moments of raw importance. The most notable outburst comes when Monty sees himself in a bathroom mirror, and as the frustration of his situation washes over him, he commences a tirade of every ethnic and social group connected to New York City--from Korean grocers to Osama bin Laden, from black ballers to white businessmen. Seeing this kind of efficiently blatant defamation on screen is at first jarring until one realizes what Spike Lee is really going for--a condemned man's conflicted farewell to the town he loves.
25th Hour does not contain a traditionally coherent plot and the movie seems to drag from time to time, but what it lacks in story is more than made up for in its skillful acting and careful direction. Spike Lee has often been accused of targeting a narrow audience, but here, he has made a great film, one that will linger in the minds of moviegoers long after others have been forgotten.
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