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This summer, instead of curling up with a good book — or, okay, in ADDITION to curling up with a good book — take some time to stream a film based on an acclaimed work of literature. All summer, Decider will be recommending book-to-film adaptations that are available on streaming. All the nourishment of great literature; all the visual pleasures of great cinema.
This Week’s Movie: Spike Lee’s 25th Hour
What Book Is It Adapting? David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour
Available On: HBO GO
Spike Lee is far from the only filmmaker whose name is synonymous with New York City. Not while there are Martin Scorseses and Woody Allen’s out there. But besides those two names, there aren’t too many more filmmakers more closely associated with New York than Spike. This is the man who made Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn and Summer of Sam. And little over a year after the events of September 11, 2001, Lee premiered 25th Hour, what many consider to be one of the greatest evocations of the post-9/11 spirit in New York City, half-mournful, half-defiant. What makes it all the more powerful is that it’s all done in moods and motifs, since the story was written before those tragic events. And it wasn’t even written by Spike Lee besides.
Instead, 25th Hour was written for the screen by David Benioff, who was adapting from his own novel The 25th Hour. If Benioff’s name sounds familiar, it should. He’s one of the two creative forces (along with D. B. Weiss) on Game of Thrones. At this point, though, Benioff was a burgeoning writer looking to adapt his first novel, which was written as his MFA thesis at UC-Irvine.
The story concerns Montgomery Brogan (played by Edward Norton in the film), a middle-class young man from Bay Ridge who’s staring down the barrel of a 7-year prison sentence for selling drugs. The events take place on the night before he’s supposed to surrender himself to correctional facility. During the course of that day, we meet the people in Monty’s life: his father (Brian Cox), a dyed-in-the-wool, Bronx-Bombers-cheering New Yorker; his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson); his best friends Francis (Barry Pepper) and Jacob (Phillip Seymour Hoffman); his Russian-mobster associates who got him into this mess (including football star Tony Siragusa, of all people).
The story is rich with feeling but rather low on plot. There’s a thread about Monty trying to figure out who ratted him out to the police, and the degree to which he does or does not believe it could have been Naturelle, but it’s a decidedly minor concern. This is mostly about taking in what may well be the last day of his old life. The idea that seven years in prison can change a man irreparably hangs thick in the air, and Lee and his cast do best when it’s doing just that: hanging in the air. There it can co-mingle with the dust in the air from the still-fresh wound at Ground Zero and become something heady and incomprehensible. The film’s only real weak spot comes when it tries to get too plotty at the end, as Monty tries to get Francis to bash him in the face and ugly him up so he won’t be a target for prison rape. In a story that so depends on a dreamy emotional balance, that’s way too much reality invading the space.
Better, though, are when Benioff and Lee get for-real dreamy. The two most striking scenes in the film, after the gorgeous opening credits sequence set to Terrence Blanchard’s massively underrated score, are first the scene where Monty confronts himself in a bathroom mirror, at first lashing out at every “other” that New York City has to offer, before finally settling on himself …
… if there ever was an elegy for New York in Lee’s films, it’s this. All the frustration, anger, and divisiveness of the melting pot bubbling into a “fuck you” that sounds a lot more like pride than anything else.
And then there’s the end, as Monty’s dad drives him out to prison, but not before offering him an out: a vision of the life he might be able to lead if he goes west and never looks back.
How plausible this scenario is or isn’t falls by the wayside as the viewer gets wrapped up in the fantasia of it all. Cox’s voiceover manages to paint into corners even Lee can’t get to. Blanchard’s music gets into a few more. It’s emblematic and indicative of a film that managed to touch parts of the American psyche we didn’t even realize were raw and exposed.
Differences Between Book and Movie: The fact that Benioff did the screenplay adaptation himself could explain why there weren’t major changes from the page to the screen. In fact, Benioff’s book was often praised for how “cinematic” it read. And indeed, the rights were snapped up incredibly quickly, by of all people Tobey Maguire, who was looking to star in it until Spider-Man came along.
Reading-List Questions to Answer:
- How did this movie completely miss out on the Oscar conversation in 2002?
- In a movie that’s absent many of Spike Lee’s cinematic calling cards — the jazz, the African American experience, any of his stable of recurring actors — how does 25th Hour maintain that essential Spike-ness?
- How is it that Rosario Dawson always leave you wanting to see a movie featuring more Rosario Dawson?
- Did any actor in 2002 deliver a trifecta of 1-2 scene performances in 2002 comparable to what Brian Cox did with 25th Hour, The Ring, and Adaptation?
