25th Hour
With Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Tony Siragusa, and Levani.
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25th Hour is Lee’s best feature since Do the Right Thing, and part of what’s so impressive about it is the way it gets us to think as well as feel–about things we’re almost never asked to consider, such as what it means to send drug dealers to prison. I suspect one reason this country has more than two million people in prison–we have the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, after Russia–is that the sort of people who wind up there, why they do, and what happens to them inside, are all things we don’t really want to think about. The focus of 25th Hour, adapted by David Benioff from his novel, is how a Manhattan drug dealer named Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) spends his last 24 hours before going to prison for seven years. The film also concerns the four people who are most important to him–his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), his father James (Brian Cox), and his two best friends since he was a kid, a prep school teacher named Jake (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a Wall Street trader named Frank (Barry Pepper). I’ve heard some people object to a film asking us to think–and therefore care–about what happens to a drug dealer in prison. But would they also object to being asked to care about the people who do care about him? And if we do care about Naturelle, James, Jake, and Frank, how can we not care about Monty?
Not having read Benioff’s novel, I don’t know whether it was his decision or Lee’s not to show Monty selling drugs in any of the flashbacks. (The closest he comes is a very early scene that shows Monty brushing off a junkie, explaining that he’s been busted.) Without quite wanting to accuse the film of cheating, I find this a regrettable omission, though I know its inclusion might have made it harder to persuade us to see Monty sympathetically. In the film’s press book Lee is quoted as saying, “I don’t choose which films to direct based on how sympathetic the characters are. Monty Brogan is a drug dealer–and people will find that unsympathetic. But a lot of times, unsympathetic characters make the best movies, have the best stories.” Yet whether Lee truly shows Monty as unsympathetic is somewhat ambiguous. I don’t object to this ambiguity, because it’s one of the things in the movie that obliges us to think. And the relatively unsympathetic treatment of the cops who arrest and question Monty–most of whom are black, and most of whom are shown taking a sadistic pleasure in his predicament–only adds to the ambiguity. When Monty’s offered an opportunity to lighten his sentence by ratting on others, we’re implicitly asked to reflect on what we might do in the same situation.
At one point Frank says to Jake, “You’re a rich Jewish kid from the Upper West Side who’s ashamed of his wealth.” This isn’t the only thing Jake feels guilty about; he castigates himself for being attracted to Mary long before he kisses her. But Frank, who shares Monty’s working-class Irish roots, is an even more complex character when it comes to guilt; he feels guilty about Monty’s predicament and perhaps, more subtly, about some of his activities on Wall Street.
But what if his father were to go on driving, not to the prison but across the United States, dropping Monty in some inconspicuous desert town with the understanding that they’ll never see each other again, that Monty will adopt a new identity, start a new life? This is a possibility the film also gets us to think about at length, though in a different way. Just before that final close-up of Monty in the car, the movie illustrates this plan, his father going through every step in detail, all the way up to Monty’s happy and contented old age after having lived an alternate life. We’re asked to think about not just how such a plan might be carried out but whether this is the ending to the movie that we want. Is this what actually happens to Monty? And if we prefer the alternate ending, does that mean that we don’t think drug dealers should go to prison?
