25th Hour

“Wake the fuck up. It’s over after tonight.”

This line is uttered by Frank (Barry Pepper) to his buddy Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Spike Lee’s film 25th Hour (2002). They’re discussing the future prospects of their mutual friend, Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), whose final night of freedom they are about to celebrate before he starts a seven-year prison term for drug dealing. But the subtext couldn’t be louder. Frank, a Wall Street trader, lives in a high-rise overlooking the rubble pits of the fallen Twin Towers, and the camera pushes in on this scene as the two men talk. Tiny workers move about like ants while steam shovels and bulldozers appear like lunar landers excavating a moonscape. It’s a shocking sight even 25 years later, or perhaps especially 25 years later, since Americans specialise in forgetting national traumas (the pandemic being a more recent example). To see these images fresh is a jarring reminder of how badly the attacks wounded the American psyche. 

25th Hour is a requiem for 9/11 America, and it’s heavy as a requiem, from Terence Blanchard’s mournful score to Rodrigo Prieto’s subdued cinematography, the sepulchral lighting, and the pensive performances. This movie is suffused with grief and regret. When Frank says, “it’s over”, it could refer to the loss of American postwar innocence after the first major foreign attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbour. Or perhaps it signals the end of the post-Cold War “new world order” of the ’90s, the last chance the U.S. had to be anything other than the warmongers, greed merchants, and tech overlords they have since become. And yet, the outlook is not all doom and gloom, as the movie features one of the most moving and hopeful conclusions I can imagine, one that advocates for that distinct American anathema: taking personal responsibility. 

Given the degree to which 9/11 emotionally informs this movie, including the elegiac opening credits that depict the “Tribute in Light” at Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers had recently stood, it’s amazing to think that 25th Hour, based on David Benioff’s novel, was originally conceived without that material. But while other movies of the era, like Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002), were choosing to scrub footage of the World Trade Center, Lee and Benioff – later famously (then infamously) a showrunner on Game of Thrones (2011-2019) – convinced Disney to preserve the 9/11 setting and context.

It’s impossible to imagine the movie without this context, as it adds layers of tragedy to the plight of Monty and his loved ones – not only friends Jacob and Frank, but also his father, James (Brian Cox), and his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), as they brace for his long incarceration. There is a famous scene, echoing a similar one in Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), in which Monty stares at his reflection in a pub mirror onto which “fuck you” has been scrawled and retorts with, “Fuck me? Fuck you…this whole city and everyone in it.” He then proceeds to curse out the people of New York as they flit across the screen in a grainy montage, including virtually every racial and ethnic group and even his own friends and family. He also has scathing criticism for other familiar assholes: Wall Street brokers – the “self-styled Masters of the Universe…Gordon Gekko wannabes” – Bush and Cheney for their complicity in Enron, the NYPD, Osama Bin Laden, even the Catholic Church. 

The monologue is an indictment of the irrationality of hate, as well as an explanation of sorts for how hate and intolerance could lead to something like 9/11 in the first place. As it peaks, Blanchard’s score blending Irish and Arab musical influences reflects the “melting pot” of New York and the heightened ethnic tensions after the attacks.¹ But all this blame is just deflection as Monty reserves his deepest resentment for himself, for getting himself into a situation that will cost his freedom and separate him from his loved ones. “You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck,” he sneers. The tragedy of the movie is that by the time Monty decides to take some personal responsibility in his life, it’s too late.

The montage is a reminder that perhaps one reason Lee calls his cinematic productions “joints” is because, more than just movies, they’re metatextual places to hang out. The storytelling is going to be a little bumpy, and he’s frequently going to pull you out of the “dream” with which movies envelop your consciousness. Lee reveres Classical Hollywood cinema, but in his own films, at least, he doesn’t care as much about Classical continuity, the principle that the formal elements of filmmaking – acting, cinematography, editing, mise en scène, sound – should not call attention to themselves and should instead remain in the service of seamless storytelling. If he’s got a social point to make, or a reference, or a joke, he’s going to make it.

Lee, an educator, is also happy to pause a film’s story to deliver a mini-lecture on an important Black figure or historical moment. Do the Right Thing famously features quotes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as dialogue about Black artists like Prince and Michael Jackson, while BlacKkKlansman (2018) portrays speeches by activists Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) and Harry Belafonte (himself an important activist). In Highest 2 Lowest (2025), Denzel Washington’s character’s apartment is a Black Culture 101 course: a huge portrait of Maya Angelou is prominently displayed, along with icons like Jackie Robinson and important musicians like Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin.

25th Hour is more disciplined around Classical filmmaking than some of Lee’s other films, and it feels more immersive as a result. Even the mirror montage is not really a fourth-wall break like the one in Do the Right Thing because Monty is talking to himself, not the viewer or the camera. Lee does include a few instances of his signature flourish, the double dolly shot, which makes it look as though a character is floating toward the camera. But its use here feels like an extension of the characters’ psyches rather than a flashy effect. 

Another departure for Lee in 25th Hour is that he doesn’t feature African American protagonists or themes. The film chronicles a day in the life of three privileged white men who have been close since childhood, but whose paths have since diverged. Of his feature films, Lee has directed only a few that feature white protagonists: 25th Hour, Summer of Sam (1999), and his remake of Oldboy (2013). Although the director has maintained throughout his career that he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into making only Black-themed movies, The New York Times speculated that he broadened his subject matter with 25th Hour because he needed a hit after a decade of dwindling box office and critical appreciation.² The film ultimately was a box-office disappointment, but making it for Disney (under the Touchstone banner) with Norton – who was coming off Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) and American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998) – at least gave it commercial potential. And despite the white leads, critics have argued that 25th Hour and Summer of Sam still focus on issues that faced Black New Yorkers at the time, including neighbourhood tribalism and the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, which lead to Monty’s long prison sentence.³ 

If the film remains a prescient portrait of New York, it also feels more regressive than ever in one area for which Lee has often been criticised: the representation of women. Critics and scholars, including Paula J. Massood, Roxane Gay, and bell hooks, have long argued that women in Lee’s films are often reduced to two-dimensional male support systems, and 25th Hour is yet another example.⁴ Naturelle exists largely to sustain Monty emotionally, and there is little evidence that she has a life of her own, while the role of Jacob’s student, Mary D’Annunzio (Anna Paquin), is to facilitate the emotional growth of the developmentally stunted and repressed Jacob. Both characters are sexually objectified by the other characters and by the film. Most troublingly, each is in high school when Monty and Jacob become interested in them. Monty literally picks up Naturelle on the playground, while Jacob fixates on Mary and her prominent belly tattoo in his English class. Although his friends tell him to be careful approaching her, it’s for his protection, not hers.

This would never fly from a major filmmaker in the post #MeToo era. But the movie was made during a time when American media was sexualising teenagers like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Christina Aguilera with little blowback, and making movies about middle-aged men obsessed with teenage girls, such as Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996), American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999), Wild Things (John McNaughton, 1998), Adrian Lyne’s version of Lolita (1997), and Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992). Given its cultural ubiquity, maybe it never occurred to Lee and Benioff how creepy and inappropriate it is, though that’s certainly no excuse. Fortunately, the two women are played by highly skilled and intuitive actors, Paquin and Dawson, who bring depth and subtlety to the characters despite their limited function.

In any case, the women are all but gone from the movie by the last 45 minutes so that Lee can focus on the relationship among the three male friends and on the one between Monty and his father. A wrenching scene in which Frank bloodies Monty’s face to keep him from entering prison looking “too pretty” gives way to the final sequence in which James drives his son upstate to start his seven-year sentence. Here the tone of the movie softens considerably, and the earlier hate montage pays off in a poetic interlude in which a shell-shocked Monty looks out at the city and imagines some of the people he cursed earlier bidding him a compassionate farewell.

It’s a tragic moment as he realises there was love and kindness underneath all the fear and anger, as well as a bittersweet encapsulation of New York after 9/11 and a metaphor for America. Lee ends the film on a lyrical montage in which Monty’s father offers to help him go on the lam, laying out in great detail how Monty could start over out West, disappear into the great wide-open spaces of the continent and make a new life for himself. It echoes the last scene in Lee’s Clockers (1995), although unlike the protagonist’s real escape from New York’s mean streets in that movie, this one is a fantasy. But it’s a deeply seductive one, and Lee and Prieto film it beautifully as the father lays out a happy alternative future for his son, made sweeter by Brian Cox’s dulcet voice.

The sequence also works as a metaphor for American expansionism: the hope and excitement Americans felt as they spread westward with little accountability for the conquering, pillaging, and colonising that accompanied it. But 25th Hour is ultimately about accountability for poor choices, which is why the movie ends on a final shot of Monty’s miserable face, still headed for prison. He made this mess, and there’s no escaping it, same as America. Unfortunately, Americans have only gotten better at fantasy and worse at accountability in the quarter century since 9/11, and there is little sense that things will change anytime soon.

25th Hour (2002 USA 135 mins)

Prod Co: Touchstone Pictures, 25th Hour Productions, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Gamut Films, Industry Entertainment Prod: Tobey Maguire, Julia Chasman, Spike Lee, Jon Kilik Dir: Spike Lee Scr: David Benioff Phot: Rodrigo Prieto Ed: Barry Alexander Brown Mus: Terence Blanchard Prod Des: James Chinlund Art Dir: Nicholas Lundy Cos Des: Sandra Hernandez

Cast: Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Tony Siragusa, Levan Uchaneishvili

Endnotes