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The 25th Hour
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Our DVD Price: £13.99
RRP: £15.99 Save £2.00 (12%)
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Film Description
Drug dealer Monty Brogan has just twenty four hours to make peace with his family and friends before he is sent to prison for seven years. Can he put his life in order before it is too late?
Film Information
DVD Extras
Commentary by Spike Lee; Commentary by writer/author David Benioff; Deleted scenes; Featurettes
Technical Details
| Certificate |
15 |
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Length |
129 mins
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Label |
TOUCH |
| Cat No |
D888851 |
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Format |
DVD |
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Colour |
| Region | 2 |
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Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review
Review by Mike McCahill
on 13th January 2004
Spike Lee’s first post-9/11 film is a melancholy lament for New York’s lost souls; compared to the epic sweep of Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York, this is a small-scale piece focusing on the dramas of a handful of people who maybe come to represent the city, but it’s greatly more affecting in its parade of “what if”s and the different ways people’s lives could have turned out: it seems inspired much less by the victims of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers as by those survivors who reassessed their own lives in the wake of the tragedy and gave up, say, an office job to spend more time with their loved ones.
Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is a former drug dealer facing up to a seven year stretch in prison. On his last day of freedom, he weighs up whether to accept his fate or to go on the run while trying to work out complex, naggingly believable relationships with the people who matter in his life. There’s his widowed father (Brian Cox), his girlfriend Naturelle (Dawson), who may or may not have been responsible for tipping off the Feds, and a couple of childhood friends: Francis (Barry Pepper), a Wall Street trader, and Jacob (Hoffman), a high-school teacher agonising over possible intimacy with a budding pupil (Paquin).
The greatest compliment one could pay 25th Hour is that it’s a Spike Lee film which never entirely feels like a Spike Lee film, one defined by loss and absence rather than excess and hyperbole. It opens with a shot of the World Trade Center memorial, has flashbacks sparked by the feel of an unstuffed sofa cushion, and consists of raggedy conversations in which crucial details – what the characters really want to know about one another – go unsaid. Jacob questions his pupil as to what she means when she says “that’s what I love about you”, but exactly what that is goes without elucidation.
For a decade now – ever since Malcolm X, the last monument in his career – Lee has been trying to reconcile his abiding concerns with those of a mature, intelligent filmmaker. He Got Game made a few tentative steps in that direction before turning into a big-budget sneaker commercial; Summer Of Sam, which feels like a four-hour movie compressed into one of two hours twenty, didn’t allow him the room to move, nor his characters the time or space to develop beyond cut-out punk or disco types.
It could just be that whenever independently-minded American filmmakers start making movies with studio money, the lack of reconciliation will inevitably result in films of a certain fracturedness. (Fracture is the defining characteristic of any Soderbergh film, for example.) But perhaps more accurately, Lee’s films have been films of fissure (of faults, indeed), in which the communities or individuals portrayed are almost always on the point of erupting. With the exception of Do The Right Thing, he’s previously been content to explore these fissures only superficially, to gloss over the cracks, which is why – even in his better films – there’s been an emptiness to his work of late, a sense of terrific energy being dissipated to no great end in no particular direction.
He delves deep in 25th Hour, though, whether out of a sense of duty to his city’s fallen, or that he empathises more than usual with his characters: not with Monty, especially, but perhaps with the plight of Francis and Jacob, both of whom have been in pursuit, to their great detriment, of money and sex, the things we chase to avoid facing up to more substantial problems. He’s helped in no small way by David Benioff’s street-smart screenplay, whose cultural reference points are so contemporary it feels as though the film’s being knocked out on a laptop the very minute you’re watching it, and which makes count even initially insignificant details like the fact Naturelle eats her honey from the pot.
Yes, there are still a few excesses here, but only a few. The musical score is almost continuous, which reminds you how patchy Lee generally is when it comes to scoring his films: the inspired use of Public Enemy in Do The Right Thing is all but drowned out by the Copland cacophony of He Got Game. There are also some distinctly disposable Ukrainian mobsters, who seem there only so Monty can point a gun around after a while. But the director’s new-found maturity and attention to detail is elsewhere typified by truly ensemble acting, in which all the participants seem lifted merely by the presence of one another: you expect Norton and Hoffman to be good, but Pepper finds hidden depths in what at first seems a caricature of unreconstructed venality, and Paquin’s right arm, in the scene where the teacher finally plucks up the courage to kiss her, is just devastating.
View more reviews by Mike McCahill
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