Review: Spike Lee's 25th Hour

I saw Spike Lee's recent 25th Hour the other day, and I felt sufficiently both amused and annoyed to write about it.

The premise of the film, adapted by David Benioff and Lee from Benioff's novel, is simple: a look at the last 24 hours of freedom for a New York heroin dealer who's about to go to prison for seven years. During the course of his last day, Monty the dealer (now, he avows, an ex-dealer) revisits some meaningful places, is taken for a night on the town by his boyhood friends Jakob and Francis, has a showdown with the Russian mafia patron he worked for, and processes emotions with his father and his girlfriend.

Not a bad premise, especially if during those 24 hours Monty (Edward Norton) actually learns something about himself that will both protect him in the next, incarcerated, phase of his life, and keep him from re-entering the criminal life once he gets out. But all he really learns is who really dropped a dime on him and got him arrested -- not his girlfriend, but his obese Ukranian bodyguard -- and whether or not his chums, father and girlfriend will stand by him. But as far as character growth for Monty, none. He's just as resigned to doing his stretch in prison (versus the other two alternatives, killing himself --his own idea -- or fleeing -- his father's) at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

Meanwhile, there are two overriding concerns. One is loyalty: Was his girlfriend the one who turned him in? Will his friends stand by him? Will his father help him escape? Each of these questions is resolved in turn, with not very much tension one way or the other. For example, we don't get to know his girlfriend -- a bootylicious Puerto Rican princess comically named Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) -- well enough to be able to guess, or care, whether or not she actually turned him in. Her main contribution is as eye candy, and to utter cliched phrases at the end of the film such as "I'll wait for you."

The other theme, much more lovingly explored, is machismo. In an introductory scene that takes place before the major action of the film, Monty rescues an injured mutt from the roadside. When his bloated bodyguard is afraid to deal with the snarling dog, Monty throws his jacket over the pooch and tosses the dog in the trunk of his car. "Quien es mas macho!" he exclaims triumphantly, and this question informs the rest of the film. The main way this shows up is Monty's aprehension about going to prison and getting raped by his fellow convicts. He explains this fear by stating, several times, that his supposedly pretty face will attract the attentions of others; to my mind Norton's visage is discordantly pale and lumpish, but I guess that's where a little suspended disbelief comes in handy. To avoid this most fearsome of fates, he gets a hell of a lot of advice from his friends and associates, including the vicious mafia boss, who offers the standard pointer that Monty should, as soon as possible, beat the crap out of someone to show his fellow prisoners what a tough guy he is. Monty's fear of being raped, and his certainty that he will, give him a different idea. In the movie's climactic scene, he has his pal Francis (Barry Pepper) beat him about the face to "make me ugly when I go in there."

I'm not denying either the reality or the horror of prison rape, but for even a good-looking guy to obsess over the notion that his sheer attractiveness (not) will make him a target, and worry about this to the exclusion of almost anything else -- such as what will happen to his girlfriend, his aging, alcoholic father, his expensive apartment, or his friends -- stretched my credibility. While hapring on machismo, Lee offers neither a real critique nor any alternatives. The only man in the whole film who fails to strut and preen like a steroid-shooting gym monkey -- in other words, the only alternative role model offered -- is Monty's friend Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Jakob is a repellent schlub of an English teacher, and not a very good one, as is clear from a scene in his class. Not only doesn't he know how to inspire his intelligent, privileged students, he also doesn't know how to deal with a crush he has on one of them (Anna Paquin). Francis, a macho bond trader whose slicked-back hair and aggressive attitude recall Gordon Gecko, repeatedly mocks Jakob and consigns him to "the 62nd percentile" of eligible bachelors -- a further suggestion by Lee that men's worth is tied up in their sexual dominance. And when Jakob's oversexed student, coming on to an ecstacy rush, tries climbing on his lap in a nightclub, Jakob pushes her away, sputtering (quite reasonably), "You're going to get me fired! What if somebody sees us?!" as Francis sneers.

So Jakob doesn't offer much of an alternative. Clearly Lee's on the side of machismo, as if there were any doubt from his previous movies, and if there's anything a macho guy fears, it's getting fucked in the ass. Since most of the movie is spent on this homophobia, it's only fair to assume that must be Spike Lee's greatest fear, too, just ahead of sucking somebody's cock (a practice also mocked during the film). By the end of the movie, I felt kind of sorry for Lee. He's so terrified of having his manhood taken away from him that he has to make a major motion picture about his fear. But that's par for the course not only for Lee's movies, but in general for American movies, where fear, violence and machismo are the driving forces.

As for me, I identified with the weak English teacher. I've been in that situation of trying to teach literature to a bunch of teenagers while worrying about my own life and where it's going. I just wish Lee had allowed Jakob to be a better teacher. Lee depicts the bond trader character as successful -- an interesting choice, since in the book he's unsuccessful -- but can't bear to do the same with the non-macho English teacher. The last we see of Hoffman's character, he has an anguished look on his face, trying to deal with the enormity of having surrendered to the seductiveness of his 17-year-old student. He gave in, for a moment, to his sexual impulses -- thus Lee reassures us that, at the very least, Jakob is not queer. Maybe he will, eventually, become just as big a macho shit as Francis and Monty; Spike Lee would probably consider that a plus.

As for Monty, the end of the film comprises an extended fantasy on what it might be like if, instead of driving him to the prison gates, his father takes the other fork in the road and they light out for the territories. In this fantasy, Lee offers a sweeping cinematic hymn to the American myth of fleeing from your past and reinventing yourself in a Western small town. The fantasy goes so far as to depict Monty, reunited with Naturelle, thirty years in the future, with children and grandchildren. But the car keeps going straight and the fantasy evaporates, only to be replaced by a Bruce Springsteen song as the credits roll. Monty's going to Sing Sing to take his medicine and Bruce Springsteen sings a patriotic number. You can't get much more macho than that.