25th Hour

I've never much cared for Spike Lee or his joints. There's something just a little bit off to me about the way his movies are shot and edited, and they often feel a little more goofy or amateurish than they ought to. I can't quite explain what I mean by this, but I've simply never been impressed by Spike Lee the director on either a technical or artistic level. And his filmography aside, the man just seems to hold - and voice - so many negative racially charged beliefs. This is his right, naturally, and I understand that as a twenty-something white guy who grew up in the middle class suburbs, I can't possibly hope to understand the worldview of a black man born in the pre-MLK South, but that doesn't mean I'm not rubbed a bit the wrong way be statements like, "Larry Bird is the most overrated basketball player of all time because he was white," or, "Django Unchained is disrespectful to my slave ancestors because it uses the N-word a lot." I don't actively dislike the guy or anything; I've just never been a fan. But when I discovered a little while ago that the A.V. Club had hailed 25th Hour as the second-best movie of the 2000-2009 decade, I figured I had to give it a shot. (The four other top five movies were Eternal Sunshine, Memento, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men, all of which I had seen and loved; this was no list of obscurities and strange opinions.)

Well, it wasn't the second-best movie of the last decade, and I probably wouldn't even have it in my top ten or twenty, but I very much enjoyed 25th Hour. The stylistic Spike Lee quirks I complained about in the last paragraph were still present, but much less noticeably than in the joints I'd seen in the past. The story is stripped down, raw, and simple: a convicted drug dealer has twenty-four hours to go before beginning a seven-year jail sentence. He makes sure to spend some time with his girlfriend, his father, and his high school friends, each of whom is a well-rounded character in his or her own right and played by a great actor like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox, or Rosario Dawson. Where many other stories with an intrinsic "time limit" gimmick would be tempted to pack in all kinds of action and poor decisions, this entire movie just plays out in a mellow and even melancholy manner. The somber mood and the main character's acceptance of his sentence actually blend right into the environment of New York City right after 9/11, to the point where several people regard this as an inherently 9/11-themed work. I would stop short of that claim - the tragedy never figures into the plot in any way, and aside from some shots of Ground Zero to help establish the tone, you wouldn't have been able to tell if this depiction of New York was pre- or post-WTC. Still, the movie was impressive enough from start to finish, and I'd begrudge no one for finding deeper 9/11 connections than I made, especially here and now more than eleven years after the fact.

I still wouldn't call myself a big Spike Lee fan or anything, but this movie was a pleasantly surprising push in that general direction. Time will tell whether or not I pursue more joints, but this one was pretty good. Anyway, with this movie finished I have a new "oldest movie in the backlog:" American History X, another "Edward Norton goes to prison" movie. We'll get there soon enough, I'm sure.