The capital of brashness finds itself suddenly humbled
Once upon a time, to be a New Yorker was to know the world revolved around you and to act accordingly. Let other cities deal in passive-aggressive niceties: From Wall Street to the Upper West Side to Bensonhurst, you took what you wanted and announced to anyone who might object that it was yours and what were they going to do about it, anyway? There were freedoms to such a philosophy -- the liberties of self-entitlement and self-creation, as well as the liberty to tell everyone else to go to hell.
This worked fine until hell came to New York. Among the many, many casualties of September 11, 2001, was the certainty that seemed by rights part of the city's DNA. If you lived there (as I did then), you could sense it in the weeks following the attacks: a psychic bruise spreading both outward and inward and prompting awful, inarticulate examinations. Of course we didn't deserve this. No one deserves this. But in our greed and self-absorption had we been asking for some kind of karmic comeuppance? The answer was as close as the nearest guilty conscience.
In Spike Lee's masterful, sorrowful ``25th Hour" (2002) -- the first movie to deal with this new emotional landscape -- Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) looks like a man presented with a bill he thought he'd never have to pay. Monty's a likable piece of scum, a drug dealer facing one last night on the town before heading upriver for a seven-year stretch. He visits a Brooklyn bar owned by his father (Brian Cox), hits a nightclub with two childhood friends (Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman), hides his thoughts from his young girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) . There are plenty of regrets but no self-pity whatsoever. How can you feel sorry for yourself after 3,000 people and a city's heart have been immolated?
``25th Hour" sticks to Monty's immediate predicament, only occasionally glancing sideways to entwine it with a larger civic distress. (Deleted scenes on the DVD prove by their obviousness how carefully Lee strove to keep the parallel oblique.) Pepper's character, a shaken Wall Street shark, lives in a high-rise apartment across from ground zero; he keeps returning to his picture window like a man probing an unhealed wound. The film's opening credits feature the ``Tribute in Lights" -- twin high-intensity beams that shot into the Manhattan sky for a month in early 2002, replicating towers that were no longer there. These were ghosts of more than just buildings, and they still have a mute power to make you cry.
And there is the famous, gravely misunderstood sequence in which Monty faces himself in a bathroom mirror while his reflection hectors him with every variant of racial bile a New Yorker can summon. Blacks, whites, gays, Asians, Jews, WASPs all take it on the chin, and at some point the torrent becomes a litany of human connection laced with as much tenderness as hate. Then it stops, because Monty can at last blame nobody for his misfortunes but himself. ``25th Hour" whispers that 9/11 ironically set us free from our smug, lonely delusions of invincibility -- as individuals, as a people, as a nation -- and if that's a much harder world to live in, it's the only one that's real.
Ty Burr is a Globe movie critic. He can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
