The Best Movie You Never Saw: 25th Hour

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Welcome to The Best Movie You NEVER Saw, a column dedicated to examining films that have flown under the radar or gained traction throughout the years, earning them a place as a cult classic or underrated gem that was either before it’s time and/or has aged like a fine wine.

This week we’ll be looking at 25TH HOUR!

THE STORY: A low-level drug dealer (Edward Norton) celebrates his last night of freedom before a seven-year prison stretch with his two best friends (Philip Seymour Hoffman & Barry Pepper) and his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson).

THE PLAYERS: Starring: Edward Norton, Rosario Dawson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox. Written by David Benioff. Directed by Spike Lee.

THE HISTORY: People may not remember this now, but in the wake of 9/11, people were very sensitive about any World Trade Center imagery in their films. It got so bad that most of the films shot in New York before September 11th were digitally edited to remove the twin towers by the time they hit theaters. It was a big deal when they were briefly seen at the end of GANGS OF NEW YORK in a time-lapse shot of the evolving city. However, not everyone felt this was the way to go. Spike Lee, who had already been in pre-production on the film when the attacks happened, opted to integrate the tragedy into the story, memorably setting the opening credits at Ground Zero, where the clean-up crew can be seen at work. It’s a knockout sequence that, astoundingly, isn’t better known – but it’s only one of the things that makes 25TH HOUR great.

Sadly, audiences didn’t pay much attention to this when it came out, and it became another of Spike Lee’s thoroughly under-appreciated joints, only grossing $13 million domestically. Thanks to the low cost ($5 million) it turned a profit, but seventeen years later it remains a frustratingly hard movie to see (it’s out of print on Blu-ray and never actually got a stand-alone release), a cruel fate for a masterpiece.

WHY IT’S GREAT: Most people associate the name David Benioff with “Game of Thrones” but to be he’ll always be the writer of 25TH HOUR, which was adapted from his novel. A seminal film for me, as a young man I identified strongly with the character Monty Brogan, although it’s funny what the passage of time can do to someone’s interpretation of a movie. When I first saw it, in theaters, I was twenty-one, and I found Norton to be a deeply sympathetic character. My heart bled for him, with him on the verge of a seven-year jail sentence, with no possibility of parole, while he also feels that he’s all but certain to become the prey of jailhouse predators the minute he walks through those doors.

Ah, there's a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who's, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he's a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art. He stands up for things, but he's also a brilliant storyteller who really understands the whole. The thing about 25th Hour… Films like that will, probably, in the mists of time, achieve what they're supposed to achieve. 25th Hour, when it came out, people said, "Oh, it's nothing." But people keep coming back to certain scenes and saying, "Wow, that's really interesting, that's amazing." – Brian Cox- AV CLUB- Random Roles 

Watching it now, seventeen years later, I don’t find Brogan all that sympathetic. Now, that doesn’t mean my opinion of the film had changed. On the contrary. I think it’s a masterpiece and up there with Spike Lee’s very best. But there were things about it that I didn’t catch then. While I do believe Lee has empathy for Brogan, I think he’s also of the mind that he’s entitled, self-destructive and reckless, all of which made him the ideal person to bring Benioff’s novel to life.

Norton’s performance here is an all-timer, and truth be told, having watched it again I don’t think Norton is especially interested in winning your sympathy. He’s simply trying to invoke the truth of the situation, and lets you make up your own mind about what you’re watching – pretty radical for a film bankrolled by Disney (it’s a shame their adult Touchstone label in no more). Brogan is a bottom-feeder to some extent. While he’s a good man in some ways, with the first scene showing him saving a dog’s life, he also makes money off of other’s misery. Early on you see him reject a junkie, and in a flashback you see him interacting with the man years earlier, where he’s seen wearing a suit. His life has gone into the toilet thanks to Monty’s peddling. The same goes for his deeply questionable relationship with Naturelle (Rosario Dawson in a star-making showcase) who he meets when she’s a high school student playing on the swings of a jungle gym. Even worse, he encourages his friend, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jacob, in his disastrous flirtation with one of his students, played by a young Anna Paquin.

Oddly, the most sympathetic character, other than Brian Cox as his working-class hero dad, is Barry Pepper’s high volume trader, Frank. I used to see him as a scumbag, but now I think he’s the only one with his head screwed on straight, warning Jacob about his student (asking him, “who are you, R. Kelly?”) and seeing Monty for what, in many ways, he is. However, he does have the film’s ugliest scene, where he berates Naturelle for what he perceives is her betrayal, with him getting a well-deserved slap for using a racial slur`.

All in all, it adds up to a thought-provoking film, and Lee’s style is incredible, but the gorgeous 35mm photography by Rodrigo Prieto is butchered on the DVD (it’s amazing how far home video technology has come – I wish I had taken the splash and bought the pricey digital HD version). The score by Terence Blanchard is one of his best, coupled with some great song selections by Spike Lee, including Liquid Liquid’s killer track, “Cavern”, which I listened to over and over back in the day. Plus – Spike Lee’s choice to set it in post-9/11 New York is striking, making it a true time capsule of what’s turned out to be one of the most formative events of our generation. Even though it’s not about 9/11 per se, it’s also still, without a doubt, the best movie ever made about the event.

Like Ed Norton's diatribe to the mirror, the hate speech. And the whole last sequence of the movie—the journey, and my monologue. Where he's going to go, what's going to happen. The elegiac nature of it. It's about a kind of America that's changing. Which is why Spike plugged it straight into 9/11 in that sequence where they look down into that black hole of Ground Zero. It's a very, very vibrant film. More than anything else, it's a very accurate social and emotional document of a real period in time. The disconnection. The wishing to start a new life, with new values. I think it's an amazing film, actually.- Brian Cox -AV CLUB- Random Roles 

BEST SCENE: Of course, if we’re going to discuss 25TH HOUR, the scene to single out is Monty’s long mirror monologue. In it, he dives into every racist stereotype he can think of in a loathsome attack, only to realize in the end that he has no one to blame for his misery but himself.

PARTING SHOT: If you haven’t seen 25TH HOUR you owe it to yourself to discover one of Spike Lee’s truly underrated masterworks, and while you’re at it, check out SUMMER OF SAM, HE GOT GAME and BAMBOOZLED too. Spike Lee is the man and I truly think this holds up as one of the definitive films of its era, as evocative of the early 2000s as something like MEAN STREETS or TAXI DRIVER was of the seventies.