Newsnight Review discussed Spike Lee's film 25th Hour.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK KERMODE:
With all of his films, there are elements that you really like and other elements that you find problematic. The good things about the film are the central relationship between the guy going down and his father, and his family and girlfriends, who may or may not have betrayed him. There is a great maturity which is very well drawn. My problem with it is I don't buy the post- September 11th stuff, which has been shoe-horned in afterwards. The novel was written before that. He has now opened the film with this vision of these memorial beams of light in New York. There is a key sequence in which a dialogue scene happens in an apartment which overlooks ground zero. One of the characters is made into a firefighter who has lost friends. That stuff, for me, felt bogus. He said he didn't feel the story would make sense without it, but those scenes were unnecessary. They undervalued the great achievement of the central character relationships. It really demonstrated that he is much more than an African American film maker. He can deal with all these different cultural things equally well.

MARK LAWSON:
Rosie, it's well known that the Disney studio didn't want all this September 11th stuff. He has the final cut so got it in. Do you think that element worked?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I found it completely irrelevant to the entire film. I didn't see really why it was there, apart from almost to position the film in a kind of dateline to say, "I have made this yesterday," kind of sense.

MARK LAWSON:
His argument is that it changed New York and if you make a contemporary film of New York, you need that in?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I don't think it changed the story. It's the story about one man. I found it fantastically moving. There was no side- taking or sense of criticism about what he had done, about the fact he was going to face this jail sentence. He does it with a kind of nobility that was very moving. I though the scenes with his father, when his father hands him the slightly torn photograph of him as a kid, it's almost become sentimental, but it draws back because it has such very powerful acting. After I had seen a bit of the September 11th stuff, I just kind of found I ignored it entirely in the film. It seemed to me, well, it was there, but you could also have been seeing the Empire State Building.

WILL SELF:
In fairness to Lee, no, not in fairness to Lee, why be fair to him? He could have done something with that September 11th material. He would have had to say that the central character was some sort of personification of Manhattan, and his downfall was in some sense in parallel with the downfall of the city. He is clearly not trying to do that. He seems to be suffering from a problem which is that American artists, faced with this extraordinary political and, as it were, moral singularity, have felt compelled to become journalists in some way. They have somehow felt that art has to respond to what's happening now because it's an extraordinary event. I think that's totally the wrong approach. I agree with Rosie and Mark, that you really want to leave that out and press on with the story you have. Actually, looking at the main narrative of the film, that's problematic as well. I noticed that it builds beautifully up until this big nightclub sequence, where it's revealed who in fact has betrayed him, without giving it away, and then actually the narrative tension sags noticeably.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Except for the moment when the decision as to whether the father is going to drive him to jail or not. Again, I found that really very moving . The father is prepared to do that. Did you think it was maudlin in the sentimentality?

WILL SELF:
I did, but I don't mind that. I can go there. I think it was a great example of what Lee is like as a film maker. As Mark said initially, fantastically patchy, but so much swagger in that movie.