Movie: 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
"This life came so close to never happening..." Few contemporaries, in any field, have done as much to highlight America's racial and social injustices as Spike Lee, but what makes him such a great filmmaker is his understanding that societal structures can't entirely account for human folly. Do the Right Thing! leaves no doubt about how race and class shape its Brooklyn neighborhood and create power hierarchies and tension, but, without ever losing that context, Lee depicsts Raheem's death and the ensuing destruction of Sal's pizzeria as the result of a series of choices made by humans acting out of love, anger, desire, chagrin, playfulness, irrationality, and a sense of community. Lee has criticised audiences for failing to understand why Mookie threw the trash can into Sal's pizzeria, and even if you set aside political considerations, it's easy to see why such an audience response might irk Lee. Cause he does the work, and never forgets to consider Sal's feelings about that faithful night. It all came so close to not happening, and you can sense why Sal may feel that it never should have happened.
Too many contemporary filmmakers wanting to dip their toes in social criticism fail to give their individual characters the humanity Spike Lee provides, resulting in films that are angry about the system without showing how that system actually affects real recognisable people, making their characters merely artificial symbols of a struggle. It wouldn't hurt either to put in an effort to see political/social adversaries as actual people with feelings, ideas and hopes worth exploring, which finally brings us to 25th Hour, a film that makes you care deeply about the inner lives and personal struggles of two douchebags (you can easily imagine Barry Pepper's character play a racist cop in another Spike Lee movie) and a cowardly privileged professor who would love to be able to fall in love with his student, without feeling guilt over it.
The main douchebag is Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a semi-professional crack dealer who got caught and is now spending his last 24 hours as a free man with his two best childhood friends, Wall Street trader Frank (Barry Pepper) and high school professor Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his dad (Brian Cox) and his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). Each of these people approach the day with a huge lump in their troath that they can't quite express, partly because it's hard to put into words such a monumental change that will forever alter their lives, partly becuase they all have their own individual hangups. Luckily, there is Terence Blanchard, whose score plays as if its composed by that lump in their throats, expressing their confused sadness and apprehension of the incomprehensible magnitude of the coming void in ther lives. The score adds an almost mythical dimension to the film, that's even further progressed by Lee setting it in the direct aftermath of 9/11 with Pepper's apartment even looking directly at the site where the Twin Towers used to be.
If I would be forced to choose, I'd say that this is my favorite original film music, but 25th Hour also contains two scenes of similar greatness The first one comes early when after seeing 'Fuck You' scribbled on a bathroom mirror, Monty responds by disparaging just about every single meaningful ethnic and social group in New York, with each of them appearing in a montage that works as a love letter to the diversity and resilience of the city following the terrorist attacks. An additional nice Spike Lee touch is that he adds a small dash of surrealism to the scene by having Norton's reflection come off as much angrier than the actual Monty standing in more quiet resignation in front of the mirror, knowing that he can't really blame 'the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair" or the "uptown brothers who don't pass the ball, never play defense and take five steps on every lay-up" for all his troubles. Some of these people we'll see again in the film's ending scene, when his dad drives him to prison and tempts him with an alternate life. He could take the wrong turn, drive out of New York, all the way into the west where in some faraway desert town Monty could build a new life. It's a scene of great melodramatic magnificence that (admittedly featuring some absolutely godawful make-up work) culminates with the words that open this piece, so effective because they are equally devastating in the context of both the alternate reality imagined for Monty and his actual reality. They serve also as a wonderfull expresion of the feelings of anger, love and disappointment Cox has towards his son. And again the scene works as a love letter, in this case to the vastness and the possibility of America, making it only more tragic that out of all the choices Monty's had, he decided to be a mediocre crack dealer barely ever traversing beyond the familiarity of his neighborhood.
It's notable though that it's mostly the others who dwell on what could have been. Norton regrets getting caught, and is pissed off about it, but he doesn't exactly regret his life choices. Though outwardly he presents himself as wanting to make amends, his final night of freedom is mostly about living the kind of life he did when all went well. He enjoys being able to get a private room with his friends and lover in a big nightclub where he can say cleverly sounding stupid things like "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends", and succesfully pretend that he understands the ethical misgivings of his friend who's in love with a student, while secretly judging him for being a weakling who can't act. What makes Lee great is that he is never (explicitly) judgemental about all this. He understands the allure of this life, and he sympathises with Monty's regret that he has to abandon it. The film looks at the situation from the closured view of Monty and his friends, and finds itself on their same confused emotional wavelength. Lee makes sure to film even the most meaningless, dumb or nonsenical act in a way that feels almost epical and eternal. In the process, the film also becomes a great dramatic depiction of the kind of friendship that was comically presented in The Big Lebowski, with Hofman's Jacob in the role of Donny.
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