Spike Lee’s 25th Hour is both a searing look into the last day of freedom for a convicted felon and an endearing look at a shattered and heartbroken city coming to terms with the terrorist attacks of September 11. David Benioff adapted his own novel about Monty Brogan, a drug dealer who loses everything when the Feds raid his apartment. The film’s primary action takes place over a single day in New York City, revealing in flashbacks how Monty got into this mess in the first place. Edward Norton plays him as an amiable man. He’s smart and loyal. He loves his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). In the opening flashback, he rescues a beaten dog left for dead on the side of the road. On this last morning before he leaves for prison, he walks his dog through the streets of the city. It is calm.
The film looks and feels much like Monty does, like the mourning yet recuperating city does. It is often dark but at the same time serene. Terence Blanchard’s score is one of the most affective musical pieces in the last ten years, movie or no movie. Though it is a realistic look into the life and last day of a man, the film is also a fantasy. In one sequence, Monty enters a bathroom at his father’s bar and looks at the mirror. The words “Fuck You” are written on the mirror, which unleashes a torrent of anger and emotion from Monty, who proceeds to chastise everything and everybody in New York City, to curse Jesus, and to ultimately relent and accept the truth. “No, fuck you Monty Brogan,” he says, “you had everything and you threw it all away, you dumb fuck.”
He is to live seven years in Otisville Correctional Facility, but to him and his friends it might as well be a lifetime. He spends the last night of freedom by having dinner with his father (Brian Cox) and then meeting up with Naturelle as well as his two best friends, Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank (Barry Pepper). Should he skip town, avoiding his sentence to become a fugitive? His father would lose his bar, which he put up as bail. But his father doesn’t care. In the film’s final sequence, his father encourages him to run. This time Brian Cox delivers a powerful voiceover as we see the life that Monty could have if he were to avoid prison. It might as well be a lifetime. 25th Hour is the best film of the last decade.
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