25th HOUR (Spike Lee, 2002) R

Reviewed: December 15th, 2002

To quote Captain Obvious, Spike Lee is not known for his restraint (supporters and detractors alike can at least agree he's one of the most audacious, kitchen-sink filmmakers around). This deficiency is both Lee's achilles heel (ex: Summer of Sam is a blurry hodgepodge buried beneath pounds of excess) and his ace in the hole (ex: Do the Right Thing is one of the greatest movies ever made), depending on any number of variables. Throughout Lee's career he's proven, bold failures aside, he is capable like few others of harvesting his inexhaustible bravado into mighty, fully formed assaults. 25th Hour is in the latter category, a powerful attack on friendship, survival and guilt in the form of an ensemble piece that actually stays focused on a manageable, firmly-established-then-expertly-developed number of characters (primarily three). Craftily concealing his intentions (and thereby securing financing from Disney's Touchstone banner), Lee has also created a crucial post-9/11 portrait of a city in transition (leave it to Lee -- neck and neck with Woody Allen as the most prominent drawer of the NYC mindscape -- to be the first to do this) under the guise of a somewhat standard-sounding logline ('The last day in the free life of a prison-bound New York City drug dealer'). 25th Hour is as far from a crime pic as can be though, and indeed, the one crime genre staple present -- a whodunit of sorts -- is the movie's least interesting strand.

Though I already heard the cynical groans of those in my audience who begrudged Spike each and every one of his mesmerizing, rhetorical centerpieces (I can't spoil these but suffice to say they entail some of 2002's best footage), they're way-the-hell missing the point. Sure a few of these scenes could stand to be trimmed down fifteen or thirty seconds (and one altogether doesn't work), but as I said, it's Spike's willingness to push himself so close to the edge, Spike's willingness to jump overboard, that makes him one of our most exciting filmmakers in the first place. Sometimes flawed intemperance is more impressive than pristine bet-hedging; I'll take 25th Hour's raw rage over virtually every other film this year.

The excess argument is almost moot here, however, since most of 25th Hour is impressively modulated (save the annoying but thankfully not too frequently employed triple-repeat-cut technique Spike seems pointlessly obsessed with). Short on plotting and uncannily rich in characterization (the cast is a veritable who's who of our finest contemporary actors: Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox, Anna Paquin and in a breakthrough, phenomenal, deserves-a-boatload-of-awards-performance, Barry Pepper), Lee finds the right pitch for every scene, be it a calm moment on a park bench or an uncomfortable frenzy in a bombastic club. More than anything else, 25th Hour deals in strained camaraderie: camaraderie amongst friends and camaraderie amongst New Yorkers. It is a pungent reminder why Spike Lee is such a consistently unignorable director.

Return home.