Unstoppable

As I've yet to track down a copy of Déjà Vu on Blu-Ray and would prefer to stick solely to that film's considerable merits, I figure I might as well use Unstoppable as an excuse to make a somewhat shameful cinephile confession: I adore Tony Scott. Not his early, more commercially friendly material, mind you, but the increasing chaos of his second-stage work. His work in the new millennium has placed him in the nebulous, bizarre realm between the gauche incoherence of Michael Bay and the sensualist poetry of Wong Kar-wai. Yes, I said it.

Yet where Bay contents himself to roll around in incompetence, stringing together half-narratives out of weightless ultimatums (there's an asteroid! No more questions!), rapid edits designed to mask the formlessness of his shots and a sickening gauze slopped over the whole proceedings -- to say nothing of his cocktail of racial stereotypes and light misogyny -- Scott's films are more tactile and resonant. Though his narratives of late have been just as abstract as Bay's, Scott infuses his films with a focus on emotion, his own lack of clearly defined structure revealing an elliptical plotting than a futile attempt to outpace his inanity.

Unstoppable, then, may be the film to remind people who fell off the Scott wagon when it hit an elevated rail curve in excess of 75 mph. Befitting a movie about a runaway train, Unstoppable is as linear as the path to which that train is bound. Without the narrative-bending worry of time travel to worry about, Scott can devote his full energies and his host of in-camera effects to jazzing up the CSX 8888 incident that occurred in northwestern Ohio in May 2001. But the changes he makes to further dramatize the story bring out some of his pet topics in recent years.

Scott turns the pre-9/11 incident into a post-9/11 one, updating the event to coincide with our altered perspective. And by changing the setting from Ohio to the even more blatantly post-industrial area of southern Pennsylvania, the director creates a blend of the natural and the manmade, the rural areas through which rails run evoking the nation's past and a more prosperous and adventurous time before running into urban decay, the endpoint of America's Manifest Destiny and the rush to industrialize.

When Will Colson (Chris Pine, looking fresh-faced even with his considerable stubble) arrives at his first day on the rails, he finds older workers who've seen that decay get worse over the years. A table of old-timers grumbles over Will's last name, linking him to the union bosses that surely gave this newbie his job through nepotism. Even without that foot in the door, though, Will and other young men likely would have taken their jobs anyway. It's cheaper to start a bunch of rookie labor at entry salary and let them go before benefits accrue than to keep funding the pensions and modestly larger checks of the vets.

Will partners with Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), who eyes the young man with the same suspicion his friends cast upon the newcomer. Will, the conductor, may be in charge of the freight train they're running that day, but Frank won't let the slightest error go without comment. A Saturday Night Live sketch spoofed the trailer for the film, playing up the overt hints of bromance and grudging-mutual-respect buddy comedy, and Unstoppable certainly contains that element. After hounding Will's ass all morning, the two bond over familial troubles, Frank with his daughters who work at Hooters and care little for their father's admittedly half-hearted attempts to win them over, Will with his estranged wife.

However, Scott's interest in macho standoffs elevates their chatter over mere pablum. Though his explorations of masculinity have never risen above a sub-Michael Mann level, Scott has a keen eye for surveying how men puff out their chests in front of each other; after all, the men in his films always toughen up and preen themselves when dealing with other men far more than they do to woo a woman. Denzel, with his shaved head removing any gray and maintaining the lingering youth of his bright face, teases, almost flirts, with Pine, that adorable young upstart with the most striking pair of baby blues to come along since Alexis Bledel. Part of the reason I never saw Scott's remake of The Talking of Pelham 123 is that the movie that played in my head -- of Scott using Travolta's butch posturing as a means of messing with that latent homosexuality so many see in the actor -- would likely be more revealing than the actual movie, and Unstoppable adds an age component to the mix, creating a faint paternal bond in addition to the usual bromance.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the freight district, the world's laziest train engineer (Ethan Suplee) has the simple task of moving a massive train loaded with enough cars to make it the length, yes, of the Chrysler Building from one area of the storage yard to another. As he only has to move the thing a bit, Dewey does not bother to tie the air brakes on the train, and when he notices a switch up ahead hasn't been activated, he jumps out of the cab to throw it himself. When he moves to get back on, the throttle slips to full speed and he cannot catch up. So now there's a giant train with no brakes barreling down the rails against incoming traffic. Oh, and did I mention that it's loaded with highly toxic and combustible chemicals?

Scott's in-your-face direction works marvelously here, distracting us from the inevitability of the runaway train coming into contact the other trains we see along the way -- the protagonists', a passenger engine carrying school children ironically there to learn about rail safety. He warps the dimensions, rarely giving us a full look at the locomotive and its cargo to emphasize how massive it is. The screech of metal on metal builds in the sound mix, overwhelming the ears and sounding like the beastly howl of a giant monster. When Frank and Will decide to unhitch their cargo and chase after the train in reverse to hook up to its rear and slow the thing down, Scott avoids the dramatic pitfalls that might come with two objects following the exact same path under constant surveillance by always stressing the pain in the men as they struggle to catch up to the speeding bomb. When they hit top speed and still cannot close in, the mounting sense of panic extends to the audience.

Impressively, Scott uses a bait-and-switch to lure the audience into a much tawdrier brand of suspense picture before moving into something much more complex. The trailers advertised the chemical train on a collision course with the one carrying children, but that particular tragedy is averted early on, shifting the focus away from a cheap, exploitative plot to one that calls more attention to the sociopolitical implications of the story. Back at the station, Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson), the yardmaster, tries to coordinate efforts but is stymied every step of the way by the corporate higher-ups who prove willing to sacrifice lives before profits. While others calculate the human cost of the train derailing on the sharp elevated curve in Stanton that couldn't possibly handle such a massive train at such a high speed, the executives, personified by the company's vice president (Kevin Dunn), cannot even stop thinking about money when considering worst-case scenarios. Thus, the train itself becomes something of a metaphor for a, wait for it, runaway economy, set in motion by those smart enough to know how the components work but too lazy to do the job thoroughly and with integrity, then perpetuated by those who stood to make the most money off the disaster.

To be honest, though, what caught my eye was the masterful and scathing indictment of the "24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator" as Jon Stewart termed the media in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity. The use of fake telecasts as a means of communicating plot developments has become increasingly common lately, but Scott plants his tongue firmly in cheek and reveals almost the whole of the film through news. As Dunn's VP and the other executives come up with every more useless measures designed to save money and maybe stop the train too if that would help, the media spends no time trying to get to the truth of their inane actions, accepting a refusal to comment without protest and instead swarming the rail line for coverage. TV station helicopters circle around the train so rapidly and hungrily that one concludes that anyone looking to pilot a chopper for TV news should have military training in advanced flying techniques just to avoid crashing into the other five choppers in the vicinity. Snatches of trite anchor commentary crackles at the edge of the soundtrack as Scott jumps from news footage back to his own look at the action, and we hear fatuous remarks like "That was so crazy!" said with ratings-hungry glee as a man's life is lost in one of the company's abysmal schemes. They sound uncannily like the same pundits who compared night vision footage of the bombing of Baghdad to video games. (I was also particularly amused that Scott made reference to the crutch of news footage as plot device when Dunn throws up his hands in a fit and asks why they can only ever get updates on the train from the news and not their own people.)

Unstoppable may lack the formal daring of Déjà Vu, but it easily ranks among Scott's finest work, a commemoration of post-9/11, average Joe heroism wrapped in the dark comedy of its Ernest Goes to Oklahoma City feel of accidental domestic terrorism. I've wanted to see the film since it came out, but the intervening month has brought a news story that makes the commitment to saving others at the risk of death and lasting injury from toxic fumes all the more apt: I'm speaking of course of the Republican senators voting down health care for 9/11 first responders, denying desperately needed coverage for those suffering complications arising from their acts of selflessness and patriotism. Frank and Will have no reason to risk themselves, the former being edged out to circumvent full retirement benefits, the later brought on solely as cheap labor, but they do it anyway because they would not consider the alternative.

This severity is some of the smartest material to yet appear in a Scott film, but what makes him so endlessly entertaining is that he never devolves into polemics. Fundamentally, Unstoppable has fun with its narrative, taking joy in making vehicles bound to a set route unpredictable. Backup characters like Kevin Corrigan's half-officious, half-amiable safety official and Lew Temple's madman, redneck railroad welder are fantastic and, along with Dawson and Dunn, some rare examples of interesting side players in a Scott film. As for the aesthetics, the washed-out look of muted colors cannot bleach the beauty of his backgrounds, both the forests and the industrial dumps, and they seem even more vibrant when blurred outside the speeding cabs. The only garish element is the yellow safety vest Will wears, which clashes so violently that even Frank demands he take it off in the middle of danger just to avoid insult added to injury.

Scott loves his film grain, and he compounds the hazy look of the movie at the climax by placing a container of actual grain at the back of the runaway train that explodes when the two trains meet, spraying grain over the grain. It's a hilarious, boyish trick that only someone as clever and wry as Scott could pull off in popcorn entertainment, and it's as delightful as any of the more subtle moments in Unstoppable. See it. Otherwise, there will be a hole in your 2010 viewing...the size of the Chrysler Building.

Sin City

Upon the release of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Pauline Kael dubbed it "the first American film that is a fascist piece of art." One could certainly argue to what extent Peckinpah celebrates the violence in that film (or any of his others, for that matter), but Kael's supremely backhanded compliment -- her overall review was actually positive -- tumbles around the back of my head whenever I sit down with one of my favorite lazy day movies: Robert Rodriguez's Sin City.

More than Grindhouse, on which Rodriguez of course worked, Sin City embraces and celebrates kitsch, its bawdy, ham-fisted B-noir revival as marvelously warped and questionably moral as it was on the pages of Frank Miller's scattershot miniseries. Collecting the finest of Miller's collection for a series of ghastly vignettes, Sin City plays to the strengths of both its visionaries and emphasizes the ties that bind them: campy ultraviolence, stilted dialogue and DIY technical sizzle.

Indeed, Sin City ranks as one of the more innovative uses of computer animation in film, nearly flawless in its creation of the noir-iest noir world ever made. It's filled with Gothic arches, high ceilings, creepy dives, bright lights, dark shadows and so much more. Its crisp, high-definition back-and-white photography adds to the atmosphere, and the occasional flash of color across the screen -- be it red blood, a Yellow Bastard or the irresistible azure eyes of Alexis Bledel -- only burns the images further into our heads. Rodriguez so respects Miller's work that, apart from giving the author a co-director credit (something, judging from the commentary, he richly deserved), he transplants the look of the comics almost exactly from page to screen. Now, of course, we've all seen Zack Snyder move this aesthetic choice up to and too far beyond its limits, first celebrating some of Miller's basest instincts with 300 then utterly missing the point of Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen. Here, however, the minds of the two creative forces meet in harmony, and luckily the material is thick enough that not much rides on capturing both the aesthetic and the moral.

That's not to say that Sin City lacks for cleverness, even outright satire, however. Quite the opposite: Sin City paints a portrait of a city that makes Gotham look like Boca Raton. It's so governed by corruption, deception and the wild abandon that comes with a short life expectancy that the entire place seeps and oozes, putrid water running down chipped bricks as if the buildings themselves bleed from the violence within and around them. Denizens stand mere feet from deplorable acts of violence and react as if watching a card trick they've already seen.

It's a crazy world, and, naturally, crazy characters inhabit it. John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), the only clean cop on the force, rides near the beginning to top the son of a vile senator from raping and murdering a tween, along the way dispatching his corrupt partner and a pair of comically faux-erudite thugs who pop up occasionally to run through thesauri in a desperate attempt to outpace their stupidity. He finally catches up to "Junior" (Nick Stahl) and takes away his weapons -- "both of them," he says before shooting the rapist in a sensitive area, beginning a recurring motif that speaks either to Miller's deep fear of emasculation or his sly subversion of his own material's machismo (I'm on the fence) -- before that pesky partner returns and lulls Hartigan into a coma with the unstoppable flatness of Michael Madsen's speech.

Rodriguez then cuts to the story of Marv, indisputably the most interesting segment of the film and the true sign of Mickey Rourke's relevancy three years before The Wrestler. As he did with Randy the Ram, Rourke imbues Marv with the broken-down world-weariness he gained through hard living. Sporting thick prosthetic makeup that potentially improves Rourke's battered face, the actor plays a character so ugly he could never even buy a woman, a tank made of muscles and blood who never allowed his rejection to color his attitude toward women; though he speaks in typically sexist '50s gab -- using words like "dame" -- and discusses his unwillingness to harm women in broadly patriarchal tones, he doesn't foist his sexual frustration on those who deny them and reserves his ire for anyone he spots roughing up a lady. He's like an athlete, saving it all for the game, if the game involved ripping people apart with bare hands.

The seediest elements of the city awaken the sleeping giant when they murder the first woman to ever make love to him. "Goldie," Marv grumbles reverentially, her flaxen hair lighting up around her head like the angel Marv believes she is. But the next morning he finds her dead beside him with cops on the way to arrest him for her murder, and if we can infer that Marv was angry before he experienced happiness in his life, we can scarcely fathom just how pissed off he is when some unseen force snatches that away from him. Rourke has never been more vicious on-screen, plowing through thugs on his way to the top and ripping information out of those who might know where to find the next rung, always in manners both comical and terrifying. Only Rourke could pull off the role, molding a killing machine around a core of pathos and sympathy, and even if rooting for him means supporting a fascist juggernaut, I can't help but look into that fearsome mug and hope he "wins."

Near the end of the film, Rodriguez returns to Hartigan's story, the director's nonlinear structure appropriate for Miller's synchronous tales. Senator Roark visits Hartigan in the hospital and plots revenge for ending his son's reproductive capacity, and the entire digital world collapses. The city disappears, replaced by a cramped jail cell set against infinite black, the high contrast of the white bars instantly conveying the complete isolation Hartigan finds himself in for being a true hero in a town that has suffered for so long it no longer recognizes them. Upon his release, he finds the girl he saved, Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), only for Junior to return, now a sickly, fluorescent yellow thanks to experimental procedures meant to regrow his "weapon." While Marv was driven by revenge, Hartigan's motivation is keeping Nancy alive, a motivation that proves no less powerful. Hartigan doesn't connect the way Marv does, the difference between the two characters mirroring the differing emotional resonance of, say, Mickey Rourke and Bruce "Yippie-Ki-Yay" Willis, but I daresay Willis appears to be having a blast as the grizzled veteran cop and that enthusiasm makes him appealing where his performance leaves me cold.

Ladies finally get to join in on the fun, though, with the final major arc, The Big Fat Kill. Centered on a man, Dwight (Clive Owen), the arc is nevertheless propelled by the women: first by Dwight's girlfriend Shellie (Brittany Murphy at her most spit-fiery), then by his ex-, Gail (Rosario Dawson), leader of the city's sector of prostitutes and, eventually, by a traitorous young hooker who makes some incredible poor decisions in a panic (Bledel). A deliciously macabre sense of humor pervades the film, but where the other two chief segments balanced out the camp with serious (but never self-serious) plots, The Big Fat Kill takes the highway to cartooniness and waves middle fingers every time it passes an exit that might lead to some semblance of sanity. The prostitutes all have extensive gun training and a number are skilled martial artists; the dubious fascism receives its clearest representation in the form of throwing stars shaped as swastikas; Irish mercenaries stage an ambush at a tar pit; and a showdown between whores and the mob for the fate of Old Town. It's goddamn chaos, basically.

Its centerpiece, guest-directed by Quentin Tarantino, involves Dwight disposing of the bodies of Jack (Benicio del Toro) -- Shellie's abusive ex- and a dirty cop who brings about his doom when he threatens to kill a hooker in Old Town -- and his cohorts. With Jackie Boy's mutilated corpse in the passenger seat because the trunk couldn't hold any more flesh, Dwight's ride to the tar pits morphs into an extended homage to Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, in which Dwight holds a hallucinatory conversation with Jackie. The use of color in the sequence only adds to the oneiric quality, the gentle wave of headlights and police sirens on flesh washing over the faces of the two characters and clashing beautifully with the monochrome.

Deceptively impressive in the scripting of these loopy characters is the way Miller gently links the stories through the people. Hartigan, like Marv, places the woman in his life on a pedestal, but he succeeded in protecting her where Marv failed to save Goldie (Jaime King); both King and Alba have the most rigid parts in the film, made worse by their inability to bring anything to the role. Yet they work, as they're placed on such high pedestals that you can't get a close enough look to let the flaws distract. The two actresses find counterpoints in the far more dynamic performances of Murphy (whose character works the same bar as Alba's Nancy) and Dawson (also one of the Old Town prostitutes along with Goldie). Dwight's fever dream conversation with Jackie recalls Marv's occasional, somber mentions of the pills he takes and the "distractions" that come when he misses a dose. These threads give dimensionality to a film that adamantly wishes to remain a 2-D comic strip, and they complement the numerous digs at church and state and the way the two still collude and still harshly punish people for rules that simply do not apply to them.

Following the bittersweet ending of Hartigan's story, Sin City closes with a bookend of the brief opening segment involving a hitman known as "The Salesman" (Josh Hartnett). He tracks down a character to deliver a richly deserved comeuppance and, despite the wooden nature of Hartnett in general as well as the kooky nature of the film, delivers perhaps the best summary of the endless allure of this two-hour hyperviolent escapist fantasy. "Turn the right corner in Sin City, and you can find anything," he drawls, "...Anything."

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.