25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

I continue to love Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his most shamelessly white elephant features (topped only by Miracle at St. Anna and, more positively, Malcolm X) but also one of his most affecting. Buoyed by a stellar cast, 25th Hour manages to walk its tightrope between an intimate portrayal of the crippling fear of consequence and a vaster portrait of its application to the September 11 attacks. The final, desperate fantasy alone rates among the best and most bravura work Lee has ever done.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Steven Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is the most troublesome film in Steven Spielberg's filmography. It, far more than the contested Schindler's List, Amistad or even the tonally inconsistent The Color Purple, is the best evidence for Spielberg's supposed unsuitability for drama. Those films counterbalance Spielberg's worrisome moments of misplaced sentimentality with glimpses of an actual understanding of the gravity of the situation. The understated tilt up from the infamous shower scene in Schindler's List to show the consequences of actual gas chambers works as a response to both accusations that the director was exploiting a world travesty and his supposed lack of subtlety. Saving Private Ryan lacks such a moment. No, that's not right; it does contain such moments, but they feel artificial and forced, feeling like the work of a man who threw them in desperately at the last minute instead of finding organic depth.

In essence, Saving Private Ryan is the Holy Bible of war movies, in the sense that it contains so many contradictory, half-baked themes and morals that it can be used to justify practically any outlook. As such, I cannot say that it is a bad movie, per se; in fact, some moments display an almost overwhelming sense of form. But it is a schizophrenic movie, filled with competing influences of other war films. That indeed is the problem: for a supposedly realistic document, this is a film founded on other films instead of history.

True Grit (2010)

Mine eyes have seen the glory. The Coen brothers, smartass, shaggy-dog moralists, have stripped away even the bluff of their cynicism for their most straightforward, un-ironic film. Somehow, they ended up making one of their most meditative. Their update of True Grit continues their heightened commitment to moral reckoning of late, but the evocative (and deeply misunderstood) rumination of No Country for Old Men has given way to a message that is destined to be even more overlooked, precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, uncovered by the removal of irony.

Just as the filmmaking duo put Cormac McCarthy's anti-thriller on the screen with remarkable fealty, they adapt Charles Portis' novel faithfully, more faithfully than the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Portis' book is a light read, enjoyable but sprinkled with contradictions it never addresses. In sticking to the letter of the novel, the Coens transpose those issues and undermine them without turning the material against itself.

A revenge story, True Grit opens with an aural framing device as a middle-aged Mattie Ross remembers her father's death, the image filtering into clarity from a haze like an old but vivid memory being tapped. As the image sharpens, we see a man, Mattie's father, lying in a heap at the foot of his home as his murderer, a hired hand named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), rides away. The young Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) heads to town to retrieve her father's body and setlle his affairs, and from the onset she comes across as shrewd beyond her 14 years. A trader uses her dad's demise as an excuse to make a quick buck, but she manages to sell back the final items her father bought from the man as well as some extra material of dubious ownership in a way that weakens the man as much as his malaria.

But her hardness carries a darker edge. Tracking the sheriff to inquire about Chaney's location, she witnesses a hanging and is unmoved by the sight of three men dropping until their necks snap. When the sheriff tells her that Chaney is out of his jurisdiction and that the U.S. Marshals will have to deal with him now, Mattie asks which Marshal she could hire. Of the ones mentioned, she settles on Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), whom the sheriff pointedly does not describe as the best man for the job but the meanest. Her drive impresses the washed-up drunk, as well as a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf a.k.a. "La Beef" (Matt Damon), who pursues Chaney for the murder of a state senator back in his home state. Mattie insists that Chaney be hanged for killing her father and not some mere senator, a sly political statement but also one that reveals the myopic fury of her thirst for revenge.

Jeff Bridges, who received his "sorry we didn't get this to you sooner" Oscar earlier in the year for his performance in Crazy Heart, is still so alive and visceral that the joy of seeing him at last rewarded -- even with something as meaningless as an Academy Award -- is tempered by the fact that it symbolizes an atonement rather than a recognition that he still does magnificent work. I joked with friends that, as much as I've come to admire John Wayne, Bridges represented a significant upgrade. Yet it is in his desire to move away from Wayne's performance that Bridges does one of his few "acting" jobs, where you can actually catch him at the tricks he normally pulls off without ever trying. Bridges' take on Cogburn is nearly unintelligible, not only from his intoxicated mumble but in the not-all-there look in his one good eye. Wayne may not have been half the actor Bridges is, but he oozed charisma, and Bridges tries his damnedest to make the audience root for him while still undermining his own charm at every turn. It's a taxing job, but one he pulls off, as ever, brilliantly.

As much as Bridges' Cogburn is a murderous scoundrel, Mattie's support for him mirror's the audience's own, and she becomes the voice of the revenge-movie crowd. Cogburn instantly proves himself a lout, his slurred growl generating a host of laughs in the courtroom but also revealing a man who can casually kill a man under protection of the law. Mattie delights in his sadism, looking impressed when, stalking some bandits who might lead them to Chaney, Cogburn plans to plug one in the back with a rifle slug as a grim warning shot to the other gang members. Rooster is Western lawlessness, charismatic enough that he wins over the crowd, and Mattie, but so disgusting that whatever romanticism might have resided in the old, fat man's belly got vomited up during one of his many drinking spells. And still Mattie adores him, her loyalty only faltering when his alcoholism interferes with his violence. She literally cheers the spectacle of LaBoeuf and Cogburn killing others but, as with all action audiences inured to atrocity against humans, at last manages to spare emotion for the brief abuse of an animal.

The Coens never force this point, never turn True Grit into the explicit anti-Western styling of Dead Man. Playing it straight, they allow us to identify with Mattie -- a simple matter given the magnetic pull Steinfeld exerts on the audience -- and never pull the rug out from under us. Like an old Roadrunner cartoon, they simply wait for us to look down and realize we've run with Mattie right off a cliff, and that by looking down we suddenly let gravity kick back in. That they filter the voice of a primarily male audience through a young girl is but another facet of the subtlety with which they give the viewers enough rope to hang themselves.

That commitment to straight Western storytelling peppered with implication extends to the film's racial commentary: at the hanging Mattie attends at the start of the film, three man stand on the gallows. The middle sobs and begs for forgiveness for minutes, another does not repent but gets his say, but the Native American sentenced to die has a bag thrown over his head immediately, silencing him before he can orate. Cogburn never uses any slurs, but when he viciously kicks two Choctaw children off a trading post porch, Bridges puts the racism of John Wayne's West on display as clearly as it can be seen back in town where every black character is a servant to whom even Mattie lightly condescends. (I found it incredibly interesting that the audience burst into its loudest laughter at this child abuse.)

Roger Deakins' cinematography stresses earthen tones, highlighting the sickly yellow of fire and the brown of wooden structures. Deakins' immaculate deep focus certainly does not recall Robert Altman's hazy McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but the color palette sure does. The Coens tell a more straightforward Western than Altman did, but both movies undercut the sense of individuality of the West and the moral code of law by starkly showing the true results of revenge and duels, where people end up dead and not a whole lot else can be said on the matter. Furthermore, both do not actually occur in the classic West -- McCabe is up in the Pacific Northwest, True Grit back in the novel's setting of Arkansas -- allowing for chilling snow flurries that only emphasize the cold remove of all the surrounding space.

I've learned not to underestimate the Coen brothers, who have made their fourth film in a row that breaks ranks from the previous entries even as they all share a loose thematic core. The comedy in the screenplay leans more toward the outright aburdist farce of Burn After Reading than the glacial chuckles of spiritual and existential doubt in A Serious Man. They hinder Damon with a lisp after an accident leaves La Boeuf's tongue half-severed, sabotaging every dramatic moment the actor gets with the mild comedy of his thick pronunciation. The usual odd touches litter the cast, from a kindly but screwy dentist-cum-mountain man Cogburn and Mattie encounter to a gibbering loon who rides with Tom's posse. But even these broad types play into the directors' statements on the aborrent bloodlust of the Old West: that gentle and amicable dentist casually mentions how much he'd like it if Cogburn could kill a man for him. This is a society that would rather see any innocent man hanged than a guilty one go free, if not to ensure that all culpable shall face punishment then to simply ensure some entertainment to break up the monotony. I laughed as much during True Grit as I have the Coens' finest comedies, but as with A Serious Man, those chuckles occasionally caught in the throat.

With respect to spoilers, all I will say about the ending of True Grit is that it elevates the Coens' penchant for anticlimactic endings into a direct commentary on the subject matter at hand. While the endings to other films may be frustratingly oblique and the Coens' joke on us, their carefully structuring here only reinforces the notion that revenge does not bring true satisfaction. The Mattie Ross who speaks to the audience in the framing device is a spinster, and the Coens use her aged voice to communicate from that start that, however this story plays out, it will not bring true closure; if it did, she would not feel the need to keep sharing it at age 40. The novel (and especially the 1969 film) support the quest for vengeance, but the Coens deconstruct that bloodlust by giving it to the audience, just as Quentin Tarantino savaged lingering fantasies of Jewish revenge by reveling in it for Inglourious Basterds. True Grit may be the most instantly enjoyable film the Coen brothers have made since, well, the last movie they made with Jeff Bridges, but hidden in that digestible entertainment is a devastating critique of most of the people lining up to see it.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

The aftermath of the September 11 attacks affecting cinema subtly at first, most noticeably the digital removal of the Twin Towers in films then in production (Spider-Man, etc.). But all eyes were on the filmmakers from New York, directors who'd collectively defined the city cinematically. Woody Allen, who gave an impassioned speech at the following Oscars concerning the need for filmmakers to continue working in the city, never touched upon 9/11 as a subject in his subsequent films, more concerned with the cosmic tragedy of mankind to focus on any one event. Martin Scorsese responded with a sprawling tribute to his beloved hometown in the only way he knew how: by charting its history of crime. And so, fittingly, the task of directly commenting on the attacks fell on that most dogged and irascible of NY directors: Spike Lee, a filmmaker so gifted and visceral that even his weakest efforts are worth watching.

25th Hour, it's safe to say, is not one of his weakest efforts. Taken in context of the rest of his career, it stands out as a highlight of a career peppered with a handful of modern classics. Under his fiery hand and David Benioff's adaptation of his own novel, Benioff's original story of social strata in New York City becomes a commentary on the city's present and the choices it has for its future in the wake of 9/11.

In the opening scene, Monty (Edward Norton), a swaggering thug, and his Russian compatriot stop on the way to an assignment from their crime bosses when they stumble upon an abandoned, severely wounded dog, likely a fighting hound who lost someone money. Monty approaches to put the poor beast out of its misery, but the dog comes alive and snaps viciously, impressing the man. The dog is the first of many symbols of post-9/11 New Yorkers, partially buried in the trash, bruised and bloody, but dammit he's still alive and as temperamental as ever.

Lee then cuts to the opening credits, played over shots of the Tribute in Light at Ground Zero, then resumes the film four years later, only a few months after the terrorist attacks. The intervening years have not been kind to Monty: we learn that he dealt drugs for his bosses until cops "touched" him. Feds show up at his apartment and find bags of money and drugs (the DEA agent heading the investigation is played by Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who ports over his elongated pronunciation of "sheeeeeeit" from She Hate Me, the same he would later take to The Wire, for a perfect enunciation of just how screwed Monty is).

Facing seven years in prison, Monty looks for one last night of fun with his pals and girlfriend. Norton's performance rates among his finest: the cocksure, brash thug in the first scene morphs in the sudden temporal leap into a withdrawn, doomed individual, barely capable of masking his terror behind a stoic cool. His world's been turned upside-down, and even the little things chip away at him: he heads to his old high school to visit his friend Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who teaches there, and while he waits he brags about his old basketball skills to another teacher. When he mentions that he holds the school's all-time assist record, the teacher casually informs him that a student beat it last year. When things go wrong.

Jacob and Monty's other friend, Wall Street trader Frank (Barry Pepper) portray the class differences of Benioff's original novel and how the characters, for their vastly different social standing, all have a impressive amount of money: Jacob was born into wealth but feels embarrassed by being a man in his 30s with a trust fund; Frank is entrusted with tens of millions of dollars and tasked to make those tens into hundreds; and lowly Monty earns his opulent lifestyle through selling bricks of heroin. In that sense, they're all the same, but they rag on each other for their backgrounds: Frank insults Jake's lack of "true wealth" and uses that to justify his made-up ratings scale of a man's prospects of finding a woman in New York, though Jake retorts by noting that Frank eats with his fingers and is just generally forceful. At several intervals, Frank rages against the path Monty chose, ranting that his oldest friend drives in a car "paid for by the misery of other people," yet we met Frank investing money according to how he believed the unemployment figures would affect stock numbers.

All three men serve as representatives of some aspect of post-9/11 New York life: Jake, the intellectual, hides in the ivory tower of his preppy high school; Frank profits from the unemployment figures in the financial uncertainty in the wake of the attack, and he even lives in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero; Monty, of course, comes the closest to reflecting the "average" New Yorker. Obviously, the average New Yorker is not a criminal living on drug money, but of the three he maintains the closest ties to a working middle class background. His father (the always entertaining Brian Cox), owns a bar where he cheers the Yankees with all the firefighters and other hardworking fellas. Where Frank and Jake enjoy relatively stable life trajectories, Monty, the man on the streets, faces a dismal future and doesn't know what to do.

Of course, lest we define 25th Hour as one big symbol of New York without the World Trade Center, it's important to note that the film has its own narrative. Its characters want instant gratification in life, Frank and Monty through their get-rich-quick professions (one illegal, the other the backbone of our economic self-perception) and Jake through hisephebophiliac crush on one of his students (Anna Paquin, oddly hypnotic even before taking into account the ethereal manner in which Lee shoots her). In a way, 25th Hour is a coming-of-age tale, about three immature, emotionally retarded men -- Jake's trust fund wealth suggests a much younger man still under his parents' care, Frank escaped from the Irish neighborhood but now fervently talks of opening a bar with Monty when he leaves prison, and Monty is going to prison essentially for being a glorified courier. By the film's end, each must confront his hangups and decide whether to continue on his current life track.

To say that Lee's direction is exemplary is almost an insult to his talents as a filmmaker. I always enjoy his ability to inject his film school knowledge into such immediate character studies; among other, subtler references in Do the Right Thing was an open nod to The Night of the Hunter, and the Cool Hand Luke poster in Monty's flat smacks of a modern update of Michel's idolization of Bogey in Breathless. The film's centerpiece, set in a swanky club where Monty and co. spend his last night of freedom, is a dramedic masterpiece where the fast-paced editing of the preceding scenes morphs into dreamlike state of floating characters, blinding color schemes and slow trance music. Lee uses the sequence to get to the root of the characters' hangups, from the amusing black comedy of Jake struggling with his infatuation with student Mary (Monty brought her in with the gang) to more serious development between Frank and Monty. The question of who sold Monty out drives the tension of the sequence, and the reveal of his Judas allows him a moment to prove that he's outgrown the brutish behavior that got him pinched, though by turning his back on his Russian bosses' punishment of the rat he demonstrates that he's not quite mature yet.

The sequence and the resultant conclusion brilliantly draw the demons out of the characters and reveal the depths of their immaturity: Frank makes those drunken promises about opening a bar and assures Monty that he'll be there when his buddy's done with his sentence, but the boisterous tough guy balks when Monty begs him to rough him up to avoid entering prison with his handsome looks attracting the attention of other inmates. Jake exhibits self-control and obvious discomfort with his urges toward Mary, but all he needs is a bit of alcohol to tear down the barriers he built for himself.

Ironically, the most mature character, Monty's girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), is the youngest. We see the couple meet in a flashback, when Naturelle was 18 and Monty was "old enough to have to ask" about her age. She's a kind and supportive soul, proud of her heritage where all three of the men try to bury theirs. Everyone -- detectives, the Russians, even Frank -- suggests to Monty that she sold him out to the cops, but any one scene with her convinces us that she would never have done such a thing. Perhaps that drains the tension, but Lee deftly adapts by centering the suspense on whom Monty thinks ratted.

Lee intertwines the maturation arcs of these characters with his 9/11 commentary at the end. Monty forces Frank to at last back up his empty promises with action, and the emotional fallout signals to the trader that he's not the superior creature he envisions himself. Jake must look after Doyle, the dog Monty rescued and that initial symbol of New York, and the responsibility of caring for the dog (and the avenue it provides for chatting to ladies of a more appropriate age) suggests healthy relationships in his future. On the way to prison

Responsibility is the entire crux of the film. Monty eats a final meal with his father -- in a hole-in-the-wall place with memorials to the firefighters who lost their lives on September 11, no less -- who blames himself for Monty's transgressions because of his alcoholism after Monty's mother died. He accepts responsibility for his son's failure, something that is not actually his fault (though Monty points out when James said that the boy could have been a lawyer that his criminal activities kept dad out of debt, revealing that some blame indeed does fall on James' shoulders). This scene leads to the most memorable part of the film, in which Monty heads into the restaurant's bathroom and launches into an impromptu rant, chewing out the various races and ethnicities of the city in a racist tirade to match the one in Do the Right Thing. Some of his attacks gain traction, such as the vicious tongue lashings he gives to Osama, Catholic pedophiles and CEOs who defraud investors and employees. After he insults everyone, including the other individual characters, he finally turns on himself: " No," he reprimands himself, "fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all, and you threw it away."

Naturally, New Yorkers hold no share of the blame for the terrorist attacks, but they, and all Americans, had a responsibility to respond to them in a certain manner. Monty's freewheeling rant directs his anger in all directions, not unlike the xenophobia felt in the wake of the attacks. He realizes that his hatred is misguided, though, when he finally turns his rage inward and sees that he's only really made at himself. Lee mirrors that scene at the end, when Monty, on his way to Otisville , passes a genteel, calmly edited version of the faces who flashed on the screen as targets of his earlier diatribe. They all smile and seem to wish him well, showing that we really are in all this together. Compare this image of beauty and unity, lacking any cynicism, to all the empty proclamations made by pundits and politicians nominally wishing to go back to that sense of togetherness in the wake of the attacks; Glenn Beck's 9/12 malarkey was nothing more than the first part of Monty's rant, a promotion of anarchic racism, not unity for the mutual benefit of members of society. Lee would later find much to hate about the resulting management of the attacks and the path the Bush administration took (for those who haven't seen his Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, flip over to Amazon and order it. Then come back and thank me), but 25th Hour, made so soon after the attacks, is one of the most hopeful responses to the tragedy.*

That scene of Monty riding to prison brings the film's central theme of responsibility to a head. James offers to hang a left at the George Washington Bridge and ride his son to freedom. In an alternate vision that comes straight out of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, James speaks over his imagined rescue of his son, detailing how he'd drive Monty across this great land to start a new life, that maybe Naturelle could move out to wherever he goes after police attention lessens after a few years. Cox's monologue is beautiful and pained, almost pleading his son to agree to the plan, but when Lee cuts back to reality they've already passed the bridge. Monty, symbol of the average New Yorker and post-9/11 America in general, had two self-destructive options: lose himself in hatred, as he did in the bathroom scene, or run and hide from his problems, forced to live a life -- break out your plastic flags, everyone -- devoid of personal freedom or dignity. Instead, he chooses to face his future, without cowardice but also without hatred and a lack of contemplation. Even if the country did not follow in his footsteps, 25th Hour remains a hopeful, beautiful portrait of our potential to overcome personal and national tragedy, in no way invalidated by real-life responses.



*It's fitting that the other genuinely hopeful, non-manipulative response to the tragedy, Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, lends one of its tracks to the film.