Neil Young’s Film Lounge – 25th Hour

25th Hour has much more in common with The Hours than just their similar-sounding titles. Both films try—and fail—to condense sprawling novels into feature-films, with results that are often frustratingly pretentious and overblown, and all-too-nakedly desperate in their need to be taken seriously as profound meditations on the human condition. Spike Lee, like The Hours‘ Stephen Daldry, fills his movie with talented performers who produce typically magnetic work—but the directorial contributions simply don’t measure up, leaving the distinct impression that both men bit off rather more than they were able to chew.

In fact, so heavy-handed is Lee’s approach that you wonder whether the terrific opening titles-sequence—restrained, haunting images of Manhattan on September 11th, 2002, when beams of light indicated the former location of the World Trade Center—is perhaps the work of the film’s second unit (director Mike Ellis, cinematographer Ellen Kuras) rather than Lee and his own DP, Rodrigo Prieto. It’s certainly all downhill from here, as we follow Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) on his final day of freedom before he starts a seven-year prison sentence for drug offences.

As he mopes around Manhattan with his faithful dog Doyle—whom he’d rescued from death in the effective pre-credits prologue— Monty worries about how he’ll cope inside, and ponders the wrong turns that have led to his current dire straits. He meets up his best friends Francis Xavier “Frank” Slaughtery (Barry Pepper), a highly-strung Wall Street trader, and school-teacher Jacob “Jake” Elinsky (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is struggling to contain his inappropriate feelings for teenage pupil Mary D’Annunzio (Anna Paquin). Monty says farewell to his Puerto Rican girlfriend Naturelle Rivera (Rosario Dawson), and his father, bar-owner James (Brian Cox), and also sorts out his problems with his former colleagues in the world of crime—Ukrainian/Russian mobsters Kostya (Tony Siragusa) and Nikolai (actor billed only as “Levani”).

Lee—working from a script by David Benioff (who also wrote the source novel)—alternates between episodes from Monty’s present and past. But unlike in The Hours, when the different time-frames are clearly delineated, we’re often caught slightly off-guard, and it isn’t always easy to know when certain events are taking place. Despite the title, there isn’t much sense that what were seeing is a chronicle of one crucial day—at the end, James drives Monty to prison and, in a monologue, paints an alternative future in which Monty eludes justice and settles down in a remote rural town with Naturelle.

Lee’s visuals illustrate this sequence in the clunkiest manner possible, complete with footage of Norton wearing middle-aged make-up as this imaginary future Monty poses with his very Hispanic-looking family—the prosthetics only marginally more convincing than Julianne Moore’s old-woman get-up at the end of The Hours. Lee does no favours to Cox’s delivery, effectively ruining what could and should have been a powerful, poignant finale: rather than pondering Montys moral dilemma and empathising with his feelings of guilt and remorse, we’re instead distracted by how similar this section is to The Last Temptation of Christ, just as earlier bits had very strongly recalled Mean Streets and/or Taxi Driver.

These include what’s presumably intended as a set-piece monologue in which Monty snarls into a washroom mirror, ranting against every ethnic and social group in New York. As with the Cox speech at the end, it could and should be powerful stuff. But Lee can’t stop himself from over-egging the pudding, and he cuts away to clumsily inserts of Monty’s targets—who we (like Monty) see as cartoonish stereotypes. Again and again, Lee spoils the effect of scenes with excessive cutting—editor Barry Alexander Brown must have been worn out by the end of post-production. Even worse is Lee’s over-emphatic use of Terence Blanchard’s score, which reaches an unforgivably galumphing nadir when we see Ground Zero.

As the camera moves forward to take in the terrible vista, the soundtrack swells with operatic muzak and an angelic-choral lament. If the subject matter weren’t so overwhelmingly serious, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Lee and company were aiming for some kind of weird satire, so thuddingly bombastic and portentous are their stylistic flourishes.

September 11th is a running subcurrent throughout 25th Hour—but it’s never successfully integrated with the central story and ends up feeling as gratuitous and meaningless as the film’s bizarre running in-jokes about X-Men—which even include the naming of Paquins character, a mild variant on her Marie dAncato from X-Men.

25th Hour, if nothing else, gives Cox and Paquin rather more to work on than X2: they, like Norton, Pepper, Dawson and, particularly (if predictably) Hoffman all make the most of the meaty character stuff in Benioff’s script (this is the kind of screenplay where people always keep mentioning each other’s names.) Hoffman and Paquin’s drunken, fumbling, forbidden nightclub encounter is perhaps the strongest individual post-credits sequence, especially when the camera remains fixed on Hoffman’s thunderstruck face as he exits, suddenly realising that his life will never be the quite same again.

But we never quite make that kind of contact with Monty, even though this is in theory “his” movie. It’s really a question of focus—the actors have it, their director and scriptwriter aren’t so lucky. Which means, unfortunately, that neither is the audience.

Neil Young

5th May, 2003
(seen 27th April 2003: Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle)

25th HOUR : 5/10 : USA 2002 : Spike LEE : 134 mins