FILM REVIEW: 25TH HOUR

By Michael Wilmington

Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

4 stars

In "25th Hour," director Spike Lee and writer David Benioff unforgettably capture the mixed state of dread, disgust and weird nostalgia experienced by a convicted drug dealer in his last day of freedom before beginning a seven-year prison term.

Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is a high roller who slipped up and now faces the ruins of his once-lush life. Though he's smart enough to accept the blame for his fate, he's also savvy enough to be scared of prison and full of regret about a life which led nowhere and nice enough to have kept, despite his profession, the loyalty of his friends and family. Now they all come together for a rite of passage, a roast, a wake one of those nights when everything can be said, nothing can be avoided and all hell is set to break loose.

It's a superb film, one of Lee's best, with sharp, perceptive writing from Benioff, a tough-tender New York City writer in the Richard Price mold, and near-perfect performances (especially by Norton, and by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper as his lifelong buddies). But much of what makes it so powerful and moving comes from Lee's melancholy, heart-struck feelings about New York City, in the throes of its post-9/11 trauma and togetherness.

"25th Hour" struck me as one of the best movies of 2002, but it's also a film that will strike some of its audience as ethically dubious or threatening, pulling them down into a world in which the usual moral certainties have uncomfortably dissolved. In the 25 hours Lee and Benioff show us, plus flashbacks, we get a portrait of friendship, love and family bonds done with real warmth and humanity but placed in such a seemingly unlikely context among people who, at first glance, may strike us as so unsavory or deeply flawed that it scrambles all our easy responses.

Monty is a dealer; his bosses or cohorts (Tony Siragusa as Kostya and Levani as Uncle Nikolai) are Russian Mafiosi; his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), may be a snitch; and his two best friends are a greed-drenched Wall Street trader (Pepper as Frank Slaughtery) and a sexually dysfunctional high school English teacher (Hoffman as Jacob Elinsky).

These aren't easy people to like at first. But they're written and acted with a finesse that brings them alive. In the course of their last day and night together before the fall, Monty's bunch occasionally along with Jacob's sexually avid high school student Mary (Anna Paquin) and Monty's loyal father James (Brian Cox) wander the streets, hang out and hit the bars and a disco, do all the things New Yorkers might do on a last fling. But in this case, the fiesta is soured by fear and loathing.

It's a wonderful ensemble, one of the year's best. Norton lets us see Monty's toughness, but he also shows his vulnerability, and makes both sides believable. Hoffman is so consistently top-notch an actor that his quality never surprises you this is one of his "loser" roles, as opposed to the smarmy snobs he also defines. Pepper gives by far his best performance; his portrayal of Wall Street hip, casual charisma and ruthlessness cuts to the bone. Dawson is a great screen beauty and a natural, and Cox, as the dad, has a monologue at the end that is so beautifully and passionately delivered, it stuns you. (So do Lee's accompanying images and the lyrical editing by his longtime cut-creator, Barry Alexander Brown.)

"25th Hour" is reminiscent in some ways of Lee's best film to date, the 1989 day-in-the-life-of-Brooklyn drama "Do the Right Thing." But there's a big difference. Here, most of the major crises have already happened before the day starts. The moral choices have been made, the consequences are about to be suffered. We're not building toward a conflagration but instead raking over the ashes both Monty's and those of New York itself.

Lee and Benioff are making here the kind of movie that three of Lee's main cinematic models Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan often make, exploring the vulnerable side of morally flawed but riveting characters, opening up the dark side of American life and presenting it in a way that makes it woundingly comprehensible. In a way, the three buddies Monty, Frank and Jacob show three sides of the American Dream. Monty, the smartest, pursued it outside the law and was shot down. Frank, the hotshot trader, chased it in a more "acceptable" arena, Wall Street, but his path was morally flawed too. Jacob, the only one of the three born to money, chased something else: idealism and literature, goals that proved equally elusive and left him an impotent outsider, the prey of his own students. Meanwhile, the traditionalist older generation carries a burden of guilt too Monty's dad accepted drug money to save his bar.

9/11 and the Trade Center massacre weren't factors in Benioff's novel, published in early 2001, but the effects of these tragedies permeate the film, and those who suggest that these references are opportunistic inserts are being overly cynical. The whole movie is deeply felt, and Lee obviously includes 9/11 because he wants the film to be about New York now. Monty's crisis is that he's losing the city and his friends, and losing himself as well.

The movie, harsh and ugly as much of it may seem, is a real love poem to the city and its people. It's also a tribute to resilience in the face of disaster. And the fact that almost all of Lee's characters are white and drawn so sympathetically, so knowingly should give the lie to the frequent dumb charge that he can only draw African-American characters in black-centered milieus. "25th Hour" shows Spike Lee as a universal filmmaker with clear eyes and an open heart and a vision of New York and America that is never simple, always engrossing and sometimes transcendent.

"25th Hour"

Directed by Spike Lee; written by David Benioff, based on his novel; photographed by Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Barry Alexander Brown; production designed by James Chinlund; music by Terence Blanchard; produced by Lee, Jon Kilik, Tobey Maguire, Julia Chasman. A Touchstone Pictures release; opens Friday, Jan. 10. Running time: 2:14. MPAA rating: R (violence, profanity, sexual references and drug use).

Monty Brogan Edward Norton

Jacob Elinsky Philip Seymour Hoffman

Francis Xavier Slaughtery Barry Pepper

Naturelle Riviera Rosario Dawson

Mary D'Annuzio Anna Paquin

James Brogan Brian Cox

Kostya Novotny Tony Siragusa

Uncle Nikolai Levani