It opens with a jolt: Monty and his hulking partner in crime, Kostya (Tony Siragusa), booming along in the night, happen upon a dog, beaten bloody and left for dead near the East River. For the most part, the film cuts back and forth between this last night (the 25th hour) and the incremental events that brought Monty to his unbearable present. If it doesn’t completely make sense of their combinations, it does lay out their collisions in detail, sometimes agonizing, sometimes trite, always difficult. With a screenplay adapted by David Benioff from his novel, published in the summer of 2001, the film brings together feelings of love, grief and anger. That Lee’s movie sets Monty’s individual story against this almost unfathomably large - simultaneously personal and impersonal - backdrop is only one of its audacious ambitions. Heartbreaking, the process is inevitable. Just as Frank and Jake struggle over the implications and consequences of Ground Zero for themselves, so does New York City, and by extension, the nation, continue to contemplate and (mis)understand. It’s ironic, perhaps, that distance brings (or allows) meaning, but also fitting. Initially, these floodlights are so close in the frame that they’re almost unreadable, but as the shots pull out, the specifics of their memory and trauma become clear. It opens with huge, hard-hitting shots of the March 2002 tribute to the Twin Towers, the towers of light. While its narrative focus is Monty’s last night, the film is also about survival in more abstract and concrete senses. ![]() ![]() The connections between this difficult conversation and its devastating framing are at the heart of Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour. Illuminated by floodlights, they rake and shovel, seemingly endlessly. He’s gone.” With this, the camera cuts, at last, to show the masked workers at Ground Zero, below. “After tonight,” Frank adds, “It’s bye-bye Monty. Frank schools Jake: first off, no one brings his dog, and second, “Guys who look like Monty don’t do well in prison.” When Jake hopefully suggests he’ll go visit Monty once a month, Frank snaps: he knew what he was doing, he lived well off “the misery of other people.” And the price, for everyone, will be terrible. Too bad Monty can’t bring him along to the penitentiary. Jakob changes the subject to Monty’s dog, Doyle. I read the Post.” Besides, he snarls, all attitude and anger, no terrorists are going to chase him off his own property. ![]() When Jake, a prep school teacher, observes that, according to the New York Times, “the air is bad down here,” Frank snaps back, “Fuck the Times. Throughout their conversation, the camera doesn’t move, framing them with a window in investment banker Frank’s apartment. The day before he’s scheduled to report, his two best friends want to take him out - to get him drunk and happy so he’ll have a “last good night” to take with him, and they’ll have one to hold on to as well.Ĭontemplating this imminent loss, Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank (Barry Pepper) drink beers and argue. Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is going to prison, “to hell for seven years.” A longtime drug dealer, he’s heard all the stories about how bad it’s going to be.
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