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All
Spike Lee [um] joints consist of flawed characters and anti-heroes
who evade our sympathy yet engage our empathy. The results
are uneven from picture to picture (and within picture) but
always admirable, like the tonally uninterpretable and therefore
highly recommended if kind of awful Bamboozled (unsubtle
but absorbing until the end, when it falls headfirst into
didacticism and an homage to Network so extreme as
to be a parody of satire). In contrast, I thought 25th
Hour was about as solid as you can get. Except for maybe
the absurdly extended “What if?” daydream near
the end that most people thought was stupid -- but something
about the absurdity of it was sadly transcendent, like a self-deprecating
mockery of our desire for more and more life. That people
giggled at it in the theater only made me feel this way even
more. 25th Hour as a whole is also kind of like that,
patient and meandering, permeated by a muted and tender uncanniness
as if the movie were a wake for somebody still alive, that
somebody being central character and convicted Manhattan drug
dealer Monty (Edward Norton), who’s scheduled to go
to prison in the morning. The performances are nuanced, as
are the characters themselves and the relationships between
them (esp. Barry Pepper’s wall street narcissicynic
& Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sexually befuddled high
school teacher), but the movie’s primary subtlety is
its allegorical subtext, which is directly alluded to only
twice: once in the opening credit sequence, in which a series
of abstract lights & angles gradually coheres into the
twin memorial light beams that replaced the twin towers, thus
setting the stage/context; and again during a quiet moment
in Pepper’s swank apartment overlooking ground zero.
In the latter scene, Hoffman and Pepper gaze at the rubble
(still being sifted through by construction vehicles) and
approach the subject with opposing hesitance and cavalier
nonchalance. Their responses to the unreal reality outside
the window parallel their responses to Monty’s impending
incarceration. Hovering over both is an unwelcome awareness
of time and mortality, and this alignment suggests that the
25th hour of the title belongs not just to Monty but to the
U.S. as well. It is the first hour of the new day, and the
hour of both reflection & decision. With 9/11 the U.S.
got busted: like Monty, it was abruptly held accountable for
its profitable misdeeds. Real people died. And Monty’s
decision to submit to prison rather than flee the state and
start a new life for himself is both an implicit moral plea
and ironic parallel to the decision the U.S. made after 9/11,
and which it continues to make. Running away from itself and
into Iraq (thus perpetuating the death of more real people)
is not what Monty, or Spike, had in mind.
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