"25th Hour" Thoughtfully Takes on the Burden of Sin and Post-9/11 New York

The way a film carries itself is important. 25th Hour carries itself like a person whose seen and done too much and is simply weary of it all. Edward Norton's Monty Brogan looks like a dead man walking even before we learn what is weighing upon him. He gives off the appearance of man who wants to slouch and sag but has too much pride to let life completely crush him. We quickly discover that this is his last day before he has to go to prison for a drug charge.

25th Hour heavily carries itself like a film attempting to sort out some of the weight of living in New York after September 11th. There's a great monologue delivered by Norton early in the film where Monty stares into a bathroom mirror with "Fuck you!" scribbled in sharpy on the bottom left hand corner. He starts railing on everyone and everything: Fuck you he yells at various ethnic groups and demographics (show in a montage) that make New York City the rich and diverse place it is.

Eventually he lands on one final person to blame: himself. All he has to blame for the fate he's received is himself. He could have gotten out of selling drugs, gone into a more honest line of work like his childhood friends (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper - though they're not entirely as straight and narrow as they seem or would like to believe), who he asks to send him off. He's grown apart from his two old friends, Jacob and Francis, having fallen into a less reputable crowd. Monty is a man sorting through some picadilos, confronting where life has led him and how culpable he is.

The one good act Monty believes he ever committed we witness pre-title sequence. Monty and his criminal partner Kostya (Tony Siragusa) stumble upon a severely wounded bulldog. Monty initially feels it deserves to be mercifully put down before changing his mind and rescuing the dog. The film cuts ahead five years later; the dog, Doyle, is all better but seems to be the only thing to have improved during the interval of time. There are a handful of flashbacks throughout the film, but the film primarily takes place over the course of the last day that remains for Monty and how he comes to terms with what he's done and the prison sentence that awaits him (There's only three options we learn: he runs, he kills himself or he accepts the seven year sentence. No matter how you slice it, it's not good).

There are subplots here but they're not nearly as interesting as the languorous dread that hangs over Monty's last day. Jacob, a teacher, has a crush on a seventeen year old student (Anna Paquin) who he runs into during the course of the farewell evening (It's very entertaining story played well by Hoffman and Paquin and provides a breath of air between the weightier material elsewhere).

Monty spends the day saying goodbye to his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), whom he fears ratted him out, his father (Brian Cox), who hopes to see him run away, Jacob, and Francis, who holds a grudge against Monty for getting into a criminal life. The discussion of issues that arose in the wake of September 11th never feel completely in synch with the rest of the film, but they also make sense for the first film that shot on location in New York after the attack. They also feel appropriate coming from director Spike Lee who has never shied away from such controversial subject matter and finds interesting ways for the weight of 9/11 to meld with the weight of Monty's incarceration.

Grade: A-