25th Hour

Despite Spike Lee's reputation whenever I start watching a movie by Spike Lee I don't expect very much of it. That has to do with his foolish behavior during New York Knicks games. I find it a bit hard to believe that a grown up person who heckles opposing players can be a very intelligent person or director. For the same reason I never held Jack Nicholson in very high regard, until I saw Five Easy Pieces. I have this prejudice despite the fact that I actually liked all his movies I've seen. Jungle Fever is very good and Inside Man is a very entertaining movie that achieves exactly what it wants to. I've seen parts of Malcolm X and some of it is very powerful.

And now I've seen 25th Hour, I'll never underestimate Spike Lee again. This is one of the best and most moving films I've ever seen. The movie does not have a real beginning, middle and end. It's simply about Monty Brogan's last day in freedom, before he has to go to jail for seven years for dealing drugs. It's a day he spends with his two best friends Jacob and Frank, his girlfriend and his father. They all hope to make it a great day, because they all realize Monty will never be the same again. What is very remarkable is that all this characters are fully developed three-dimensional people. Besides that they are all intelligent, nice people. Monty could easily have a good, legal job. He doesn't deal in drugs, because he is messed up, but simply because he is good at it and it leads to a good life for him and his loved ones.

"You can't stop what's coming." This was the motto of No Country for Old Men, but it could easily be applied to this movie. The movie wisely does not make Monty a superman. Sure he can deal with wiseguys and criminals, but he still is a pretty ordinary man. When he has to go to jail he can do nothing else but accept it. In a flashback we see that when the police come to search his house for drugs he realizes there is not much he can do about it and does not resist at all or try to lie himself out. He is intelligent enough to know that there is not much else he can do then accept his fate. The movie's viewpoint is that sometimes the reality is bleak, but it still is the reality and it's pointless to sugarcoat it. Bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes they even have themselves to blame. All they can do then is to accept the consequences. One more example of this is when Jacob, a literature teacher, kisses one of his students he has a crush on. This student happens to be at the party where Monty and co. are to give him one last good time and previously that day we saw her complaining about her grade to Jacob. (This is the only slightly weak part of the film, since it's a bit too coincidental and feels a bit contrived.) Jacob and Mary get drunk, she seduces him a bit and when she goes to the toilet he kisses her. They both realize they acted foolishly that this will have consequences and simply can be undone. Another example is that the movie acknowledges 9/11. It's made in 2002 and a lot of American movies that came out during that period tried to ignore the facts of 9/11 as much as possible.

There are two brilliant scenes in this movie that could work as standalone shorts. The first is a scene where Monty says fuck you to all kinds of minority groups in New York. The words are bad, but the images Lee uses make it some kind of a love letter to the diversity of New York. The second scene is around ten minutes long and it are some of the best 10 minutes I've ever seen on film. It's the last scene. Monty's father is driving Monty to prison and tells him a story about how he could keep on driving to the west and let Monty live freely in some desert town where no one will find him. I'll write someday more extensively about it, but it is a very moving scene and it works on a lot of different levels.

One last thing. The acting is simply incredible. Monty is played by Edward Norton who proves once again to be the best actor of his generation. But Barry Pepper, Phillip Seymour Hoffman,Brian Cox,Anna Paquin and Rosario Dawson are all great. They act so effortlessly, if one wouldn't know better, he could think it are real people playing themselves. I find it puzzling how this movie didn't get a single Oscar nomination. It's one of the best movies of the last decade and by far the best movie of 2002