(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
25th Hour is such a good film that it helps us ignore a few its crippling flaws. The film is a devastating glimpse of the new New York, the one that has lost a bit of its swagger. It is a city whose affluence is now a matter of hesitancy, not a casual way of life. And Spike Lee goes so far as to place set the most bluntly determinist dialogue of the film, Monty ruminating on his current status, against the backdrop of Ground Zero, now mere concrete footprints in a vast broken space in which all rationalizations ring hollow. (On the other hand, something nags me about the easyness with which Lee incorporates 9/11 into the film. Does he read 9/11 as America’s 25th hour? Is he treating Monty’s growing resignation towards his own moral fabric as an act of terrorism? Or is he simply posing Monty’s growing resolve in the face of prison as a post 9/11 self-reflection?)
Monty has one day left before he has to check into the prison up the river for a sentence that will be long enough to permanently affect his life. As he gathers a few friends and his girlfriend to have one last stand in the hip nightclub of his Russian mafia associates we watch them coming to terms with the way their relationships are going to change due to this incarceration. In the same way that Bresson broke the back of superficial narrative tension by telling us through the title of A Man Escaped that his main character would successfully escape, so does Spike Lee do away with any dramatic tension regarding Monty’s destiny. Now the subject of social forces totally beyond his control, we are left only with the same apprehension that is growing in him.
What most critics haven’t realized is that the entire film actually just takes place in the one 30 second scene in which Anna Paquin floats through the nightclub on a “Spike Lee dolly shot.” Anything before and after that shot is just a bookend, filler, an explanatory device, a progession towards and regression from that 30 second sequence that so hauntingly expresses the ambivalence of all New York bacchanalia post-9/11. This is Lee’s most effect dolly shot to date, the ghostly movement of a soul through its own space.