![]() ![]() Still grieving his wife after many years and now readying to grieve in a different way for his son, the man is full of self-reproach for having accepted Monty’s dirty money to pull the bar he owns out of debt. Prior to a private party in a club run by Russian mobster Uncle Nikolai (Levani), Monty has dinner with his widowed father (Brian Cox). Jacob’s self-loathing gets additional fuel from his attraction to underage lit student Mary (Anna Paquin), who manipulates him with her sexuality but is shocked when he responds. Trio’s other two members are hotshot Wall Street bond trader Frank (Barry Pepper), who grew up with Monty in an Irish neighborhood, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a poorly paid teacher described by Frank as a “whining malcontent,” whose sorry existence is an apology for his rich Jewish upbringing.īoth men are down on themselves for allowing Monty to become enmeshed in the drug business. The film focuses as much on Monty’s friends, examining the way personal history outweighs any present connection for the three central characters, who went through school together. The day and night serve also as a farewell to the city he knows from a position of privilege and power. Monty tries to account for the direction his life has taken while saying his goodbyes to family, friends, his drug associates and Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), the girlfriend who may or may not have sold him out to the DEA. Taking place over a volatile 24-hour period in much the same way as Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” story picks up on savvy, educated Brooklynite Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) with one day to go before checking in to prison for seven years on a drug conviction. While disrupting some of the film’s focus, this adds an engaging novelistic tableau. Character-driven pic provides strong opportunities for a fine ensemble of actors and for Lee, maintaining his signature style, to depart from his regular ethnic territory, working for the first time with a drama built predominantly around white characters, and to deliver one of his more interesting recent films.ĭrama marks an intelligent, textured screenwriting debut for NYC native Benioff, attached to a slew of high-profile studio projects, adapting everything from Hemingway to Homer and penning scripts for directors such as Wolfgang Petersen, David Fincher, Kimberly Peirce, Curtis Hanson and Marc Forster.īenioff sticks close to the structure and much of the razor-sharp dialogue of the already highly cinematic 2001 novel, resulting in a multicharacter narrative that continually shifts from the central figure to take in the lives of the people around him. ![]() Touchstone deserves credit for backing such unconventional material. ![]()
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