25th hour how does it end

The Taconic runs due north toward Massachusetts on the east side of the Hudson River. Otisville is 30 miles west of the Hudson. Jakob Elinsky: What do we say to him? Frank Slaughtery : We say nothin'. The guy's going to hell for seven years, what are going do wish him luck? Trivia : Monty mentions that he'd like to be the girl from ' X-Men ' who can walk through walls. Question : Wasn't the plan that Monty's father thought about actually bad, at the end?

Never mind the fact that Monty believes it, even if the realities of prison are entirely different than he assumes. And Frank wants to oblige, too, however painful it is to work out his resentment and disappointment on his friend. The characters in 25th Hour have troubled consciences: Monty has hurt people and he knows it, and his friends, father, and lover have all been hurt by him, and been quiet bystanders to a destructive business.

They pay for it on this last day, a day of reckoning. The result is a film profoundly suffused with an aura of loss, and it seems awfully clear that this aura was what drew Lee to the material in the first place. The plot is primarily about wondering what the hell happens next: Monty is stuck in the knowledge that he can no longer fix what happened in the past, and doomed to wonder how he's going to survive the future.

I'm genuinely unsure if 25th Hour would prefer us to think about his personal crisis as a metaphor for rebuilding New York, or if it's the other way around; 15 years after the attacks, it's the character material that remains fresher and more immediately accessible, but the film also has a way of evoking the spirit of culture in those days in a way that e.

Spider-Man no longer does. Certainly, it's a very well-built character drama, with career-best performances from Norton, Pepper, and Dawson and Hoffman's performance is every bit at the same level; he just set a much higher bar for "career-best", even as early as It's a little bit too conspicuously "made", compare to the best masterpieces of Lee's career; the kind of film where I, at least, have the response "Norton's portrayal of quiet self-loathing is tremendous" rather than "Monty's plight moves me".

But it's well -made, one of the most technically confident American films of the early s. Certainly Terence Blanchard's outstanding musical score belongs in any conversation about the best movie scores of that decade: the composer turns down the jazz influences in favor of more classical motifs, though the improvisational, intuitive elements remain in his use of ethnic musics tropes - mostly Middle Eastern, Russian, and Irish flavoring. It's also an amazing piece of cinematography and editing, courtesy of Rodrigo Prieto and Barry Alexander Brown, respectively.

This was right at the height of Prieto's post- Amores perros prominence as one of the world's most exciting cinematographers, and it might very well be the best work he ever committed to celluloid and man alive, if you want to see a movie that'll make you despair for the digital-and-only-digital world we've almost complete moved into, 25th Hour will do it.

The baseline of over-saturated, grainy footage that represents "here and now" is already some of the most effective urban cinematography of its generation, refusing to make New York's streets and buildings look "pretty" as such, by capturing with great attention the dirt and grit and texture of everything we see.

But the potency of the colors do get at something magical, suggesting Monty's and Spike Lee's romantic attachment to the city even despite its grossness and flaws, particularly right on the verge of losing that city for the next seven years. The really showy tricks, a Prieto specialty, are reserved for the "out of time" moments: Monty's raging denunciation of every ethnic and class group he can think of sharing space in New York present in Benioff's novel, but in the film it feels too much like a desperate, overcooked redo of the "Racial Slur Montage" from Lee's Do the Right Thing , without the pungency of that film's social critique , and his fathers' Brian Cox increasingly feverish, passionate narrative of how Monty might escape his fate by fleeing into the boundless American West, with the harshness of the lighting and unreality of the colors increasing as the story progresses further into the imagined future.

And that's as good a place as any to drag Brown into it, since the clipped editing of the montages is merely an extension of how the whole feature has been cut: more as a series of ellipses, assembling scenes from slightly discontinuous fragments to create a powerful sense of time slipping past without us quite being able to clock it; this only changes once the film arrives at the nightclub where Monty finally stares his feelings in the face as does Jacob, in a scene that gives Hoffman plenty to work with, though I'm not sure the film actually benefits from having it.

He's had a martini and champagne and can't drink, and there's a moment when the two of them are alone that is one of the most perfect and complex that Lee has ever filmed. Frank, on the other hand, is a seasoned and careless ladies' man. We know that all of these people may never be together again, no matter what their plans. But look at the strategies of style that Lee brings to their stories. The crucial moment between Jacob and Mary takes place up a flight of stairs. After it is over, after Jacob has returned to the booth, then Lee employs his trademark gliding shot, showing Jacob seemingly floating up the stairs without moving his feet.

We understand Jacob is replaying the hypnotic compulsion that led him -- drove him -- up the stairs. Consider too the extraordinary scene where Monty looks in the mirror of a sleazy rest room and loses his cool for the only time in the film, screaming f-yous at every ethnic, economic, sexual and age group in the city and then arriving at the summation, directed at himself. When the movie was released, some said they didn't understand this scene.

Haven't we all felt that way? When all of the f-yous are really about ourselves? Lee uses a couple of subtle devices that can go unnoticed. He punches up a few moments by freeze frames so brief they're like little stutters.

We don't see them, but they work -- like when someone is talking, and we particularly take note of an expression they use. He also plays with lighting. There's a shot when Norton and Hoffman are bathed in blue light, except for a little red in Norton's right eye.

Think how hard Rodrigo Prieto , the cinematographer, worked to get that in there, and how hard he worked to keep us from "noticing" it. Then there is the masterful conclusion of the film, as Monty's father, the old Irish saloon keeper, drives him upstate to the prison. They pass under the same freeway sign that opens the film.

He suggests that they keep right on driving out west, and find a small town, and live under new names, and Monty can find the right girl and start a family and have the life his father's debts took from him.

Lee pictures this life so convincingly that some viewers are seduced into wondering if it's really happening. Who is the vision painted for? For Monty, or old James Brogan, to comfort himself that he did make the offer, and it was sincere.