During the movie’s opening credits, composer Terence Blanchard’s magisterial and sweeping score weeps, as do the snow flakes captured like ghostly teardrops on the floodlights above Ground Zero. As a New Yorker myself these days, the spectral sight of the 9/11 floodlights in Lower Manhattan are still an annual occurrence, but now as a tribute and even a kind of reassuring memory of the past. In 2002, when 25th Hour was filmed and released, they were a nightly wake, an anguished scream of loss; a sense of shared identity and community shattered, and dead still not buried or identified.
Their inclusion in the film’s opening credits sets a doleful, even apocalyptic tone that the rest of the film follows to its bitter end. It is indeed the End Times for a privileged and ostensibly “nice” guy like Monty—at least as far as exploitative drug dealers profiting on the misery of others can be. He is about to go to Otisville with a pretty face and a lifetime of never being in a real fight. But the film becomes about more than just Monty’s doom; it is of a city that will never be able to go back to the world and illusions it once took for granted.
This is captured in ways both subtle and monumental. The latter is most unforgettably crystallized when two characters, one a hotshot Wall Streeter, look out from his Tribeca apartment onto the gaping wound of Ground Zero, still in ruins and covered in debris. The actors in the scene, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper, speak of their own personal miseries and regrets, but it is dwarfed by the cosmic one out the window and swallowing Lee’s frame.
In the quieter sequences, though, the film more demurely documents that time when every NYC stoop and office was decorated with the American flag, from the homes of the Upper West Side to the financial bullpens on Wall Street, and most especially in the bar owned by Monty’s working class father James (Brian Cox). James was a firefighter once and he built a watering hole for firefighters. This was always in the script, but the wall decorations of folded American flags and photos of first responders who died in the towers, and the memorials left in their memory, feels too raw to be scripted.
It’s also in that bar Monty gives his now famous “fuck you” soliloquy, which was obviously modeled as a successor to the most famous scene of communal grievances and bigotries in Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). In that earlier film, every supporting character and passerby in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood is filled with simmering rage and anger at New York’s eternal racial tensions and rigged hierarchies. But in a post-9/11 25th Hour, it becomes something different. Monty’s epic pity party is filled with racist loathing and apparent disdain for neighbors of every complexion, religion, or creed. But as he seethes, the imagery in Lee’s montage shifts.
“Fuck this whole city and everyone in it,” he hisses. “From the rowhouses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in SoHo, from the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope, to the split levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash, and let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.”
