The other Bleeding Edge

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Sep 10 21:37:45 UTC 2021 

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
‘25th Hour’: The Best 9/11 Movie Was Always About New York

While other directors edited out the twin towers from movies at the time,
Spike Lee worked the tragedy into a story originally about other things.

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[image: Edward Norton makes his way past a flag, one of many reminders of
how the city looked after 9/11 in “25th Hour.”]
Edward Norton makes his way past a flag, one of many reminders of how the
city looked after 9/11 in “25th Hour.”Credit...Touchstone Pictures

By Jason Bailey <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-bailey>
Sept. 10, 2021Updated 11:02 a.m. ET

When Spike Lee came under fire
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/arts/television/spike-lee-911-conspiracy-theorists.html>
 last month for including 9/11 conspiracy theorists in his HBO documentary
series “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” historians and others expressed
disappointment that Lee had seemed to give credibility to long-debunked
claims. (He subsequently edited them out
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/arts/television/spike-lee-911-edit.html>.)
But for those of us who’ve followed Lee’s career, and its intersection with
that seminal New York event of 20 years ago, the initial decision was
especially baffling — as Lee also directed what many consider the
quintessential film about post-9/11 New York City.

“25th Hour” is not a “9/11 movie,” at least not in the way that “United 93”
or “World Trade Center” are. In fact, the attacks were not part of the
David Benioff screenplay that Lee signed on to direct, nor were they part
of Benioff’s original novel
<https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/22/books/books-of-the-times-he-s-young-he-s-good-looking-and-he-s-going-to-jail.html>
 (which was published in January 2001). But Lee is an intuitive filmmaker,
open to improvisation and adjustments — and, as “NYC Epicenters
<https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/nyc-epicenters-911-2021>” reminds us, he
is a documentarian who saw his city in a moment of mourning, melancholy and
transition, and wanted to capture it.

Most of Hollywood did not feel the same. In the weeks following the
attacks, feature films with terrorism plotlines, including the Barry
Sonnenfeld comedy “Big Trouble” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle
“Collateral Damage,” were delayed and drastically re-edited. Films still in
production, like “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch,” were rewritten to
remove echoes of 9/11. Skyline shots with the World Trade Center were
edited out of the not-yet-released “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Igby Goes
Down,” “People I Know” and “Spider-Man,” and a sequence of that superhero
trapping a helicopter in a web between the twin towers — the centerpiece of
a popular teaser trailer — was deleted as well.

Most controversially, some filmmakers chose to leave their skyline shots
intact, but to erase the Twin Towers with digital effects. And thus the
World Trade Center was wiped from “Serendipity,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Mr.
Deeds,” and Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander,” which hit screens less than three
weeks after the attacks. The director’s publicist explained at the time
<https://ew.com/article/2001/10/05/september-11th-removing-wtc-picture/> that
he made the last-minute decision to remove the towers because the film was
an escapist comedy and seeing the buildings “would defeat that purpose.”

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Spike Lee disagreed. “You could not even show an image of the World Trade
Center. I said, we’re not doing that.” With filming on “25th Hour” planned
for the following winter, Lee set about weaving 9/11 “into the fabric” of
the existing story, as his star, Edward Norton, explained on the audio
commentary: “It was like looking at it through the angle of another story,
but the melancholy that the city was full of in that year afterward. I feel
like the impact of 9/11 emotionally is all through this movie.”
Image
[image: Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light”
installation after reading about it.]
Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light” installation after reading
about it.Credit...Touchstone Pictures

“25th Hour” is the story of Monty Brogan (Norton), a white-collar drug
dealer whom we meet on the last day before he is to report for a seven-year
incarceration. That night, he hits the town with his childhood pals (Philip
Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his live-in girlfriend (Rosario
Dawson), ostensibly for one last blowout, but also in an attempt to come to
terms with the choices — and thus, mistakes — he’s made in his life.

So the explicit references to the tragedy are minimal. There is the opening
credit sequence, featuring the “Tribute in Light” art installation, in
which 88 searchlights combined to create two beams representing the fallen
towers (Lee said he filmed it the very night he read about it in The Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/04/nyregion/from-88-searchlights-an-ethereal-tribute.html>);
accompanied by Terence Blanchard’s moving musical score, these images say
far more about the tragedy than any news footage or expositional dialogue
could. Occasionally, ephemera of that autumn — American flags, makeshift
memorials, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden — pop up in the background.

One scene, lifted almost verbatim from the novel, finds Monty delivering a
lengthy, angry, profanity-laden monologue into a mirror, meticulously
insulting New Yorkers of every imaginable race, religion and class (before
landing on his family, his friends and finally himself). Bin Laden and Al
Qaeda were added to the list of his targets.
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Most poignantly, Lee relocated a scene between Hoffman and Pepper to an
apartment overlooking ground zero, and placed the actors in front of a
large window to view workers sifting for human remains. “New York Times says
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/nyregion/ground-zero-air-quality-us-agency-not-protecting-public-health-officials-say.html>
 the air’s bad down here,” Hoffman notes; Pepper disparages the paper (“I
read The Post”) and insists, “E.P.A. says it’s fine
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/nyregion/no-serious-health-risks-for-public-near-ground-zero-epa-reports.html>.”
(The federal agency was later revealed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21dust.html> to have misled
the public.)
Image
[image: In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.]
In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground
zero.Credit...Touchstone
Pictures

Some of the film’s initial critics found these additions to be an intrusion
— A.O. Scott deemed them
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/movies/film-review-confronting-the-past-before-going-to-prison.html>
 “obtrusive” and “a little jarring.” But as the years have passed, the
value of what Lee was capturing has become clear. On the film’s fifth
anniversary, the film critic Mick LaSalle called it
<https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/9-11-FIVE-YEARS-LATER-Spike-Lee-s-25th-Hour-2469808.php>
 “as much an urban historical document as Rossellini’s ‘Open City,’ filmed
in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.”

But Lee didn’t just capture the way New York looked in those uncertain,
shellshocked months after 9/11. His film captured how the city felt, the
strange quiet that fell over the streets, the overwhelming melancholy that
embedded itself in our collective DNA. “25th Hour” was not the story of
those attacks, but it was a story about one way of life coming to an end,
and another, far less certain one looming on the horizon.

“We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11 because we know
it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for those
who lost people,” Lee said upon its release
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/movies/film-box-office-he-wants-not-a-drink.html>
 in December 2002. “But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in
the sand and pretend like it never happened.” And that instinct, that
insistence on documenting the city we lived in rather than the city we
imagined, is what makes Spike Lee one of New York’s essential filmmakers.

Jason Bailey is the author of the forthcoming book “Fun City Cinema: New
York and the Movies That Made It,”
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419747819/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_AN4FVWVY8FGVGNFJE3W1>
 a history of the city and movies about it. He is also the host of the “Fun
City Cinema” podcast <https://pod.link/1525341222/>.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2021, Section C,
Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Movie for a Moment and
a City. Order Reprints <http://www.nytreprints.com/> | Today’s Paper
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper> | Subscribe
<https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY>

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On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 5:36 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> A little cut/paste work would be helpful for those of us hitting that
> unforgiving paywall.
>
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 5:33 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/movies/25th-hour-spike-lee.html
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>

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