25th Hour

Starring Edward Norton, Phillip Seymour, Barry Pepper, Rosario…

25th Hour

Starring Edward Norton, Phillip Seymour, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson and Anna Paquin

Directed by Spike Lee

Spike Lee’s new dramatic film brings a different face to the seedy and dangerous business of drug dealing. The movie opens with the sounds of a dog being viciously beaten to death, but afterward, there are only a couple truly violent scenes in the film, because the story is character-driven more than action-driven.

Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) started off as a modest weed peddler in high school before making drugs his full-time job. The money bought him a luxurious apartment, sent his girlfriend to Puerto Rico and kept his father out of financial hard times. Now everything’s coming to an end because someone gave him up to the police. The movie focuses on Monty’s last day of freedom before he goes to prison for seven years. As he says goodbye to the people who are close to him, he tries not only to figure out who his real friends are, but strives to figure himself out, too.

This heavy subject creates a heavy movie, full of brooding and meaningful conversation between the characters. Although the movie is about Monty, it focuses on the personalities and struggles of the other main characters without losing focus on the main plot. Although the movie takes place over only one day, it doesn’t proceed in a plodding hour-by-hour fashion.

Instead of using smooth transitions, Lee cut from one scene to the next, as if closing the book on one story and choosing another. Some storylines are left inherently unresolved. It’s almost like seeing scenes from a day in the life of an upper class, white drug dealer, except that this is not any regular day. It’s the last one.

“25th Hour” is set in New York sometime after Sept. 11, 2001. In one scene, two of Monty’s friends spend time in an apartment that looks directly over Ground Zero and marvel over the enormity of it all.

There are some powerful, lingering moments in the movie, one involving Monty speaking to himself in the mirror about all the people who annoy him in New York. Another is full of raw emotion during Monty’s last-ditch effort not to look like such a target in prison. Each scene is edited quite differently, but both leave an impression in their own way.

The actors manage to take unsavory characters – a drug dealer, a stuck-up wall street trader, a clueless teacher, a mooch girlfriend under suspicion for turning Monty in – and make them into real people with whom we can sympathize as they reflect on everything that’s gotten them to those final hours and the people they are going to become afterward.

It’s the richness of these characters, their interactions and reflections that make “25th Hour” a worthwhile movie.