After Hours - Comic New York Nightmare

Jan

8

After Hours - Comic New York Nightmare

≡ Category: Comedy, Essential, Movie Reviews By Country, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Comedy
Director: Martin Scorsese
Year: 1985
Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

After Hours is director Martin Scorcese’s backhanded valentine to New York City. It’s a tossup whether the ultimate New York movie is After Hours or Taxi Driver, but After Hours is definitely in the running. The cast of eccentrics, which would be familiar to anyone who was around New York in the 80s, is well represented: sexually casual artistes working in the lofts, creating plaster of Paris bagel paperweights; old time New Yawkers running all night diners; bums trying to use the bathroom to wash up in; burglars ransacking apartments; leather boys; gay couples; punks with mohawks; rude cabbies, and so on. The tone is right on target, too. Edgy, dangerous — anything could happen. It’s a New York City that’s all but extinct now, but Scorcese has captured it for posterity.

Griffin Dunne is Paul Hackett, a computer processor in his 30s who would just like a little excitement in his life. You should be careful of what you wish for. Paul meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a diner and they exchange numbers. After he gets home, she invites him over. Thus begins a comic nightmare that includes lynch mobs, larceny, self mutilation, and suicide, among other things, not exactly the usual stuff comedy is made from.

After Hours is the sort of movie that gives studio executives nightmares because it is completely execution dependent. Let me explain what I mean. Let’s say you have a concept like this: a guy’s daughter is kidnapped and disappears into the white slavery market. Unfortunately for the kidnappers, the guy happens to be Special Ops. Unless the filmmakers are completely incompetent, that movie can’t help but be entertaining. But the tone of After Hours is so delicate, and the material so harsh, that one false move would completely destroy the movie.

Fortunately, the script by Joseph Minion is a structural miracle: it’s equally hilarious and stress inducing and just gets more so as the film goes along. Scorcese, master that he was, draws the viewer in from the opening moments. Here’s a small example of his brilliance. Griffin Dunne is sitting on the bed and the phone rings, outside of the shot. An ordinary director would have cut to the phone. Scorcese whip pans around Dunne in the direction of the phone, but with the camera always pointed at the actor. Even though the phone is never seen, Scorcese communicates the anxiety provoked by the ringing phone and ensures that the audience understands that the object of the anxiety is the ringing phone. That’s great filmmaking.

The actors are fantastic. As Marcy, Rosanna Arquette was never better. She’s adorable, but seriously weird. We’re with Griffin Dunne every second as he’s whipsawed between attraction and dread that he’s inadvertently bagged a loony. Dunne himself is so easy to identify with. He does what we all do — try to assimilate the latest outrage in our lives and makes sense of it, only in his case, the outrages just keep on coming, giving him almost no chance to rest. It’s like life, only the worst case scenario.

Oh, there are so many wonderful actors in After Hours. Linda Fiorentino is a riot as Kiki the artist, who bares her breasts to a virtual stranger without a second thought. Teri Garr is both comically touching and borderline pathetic as a needy cocktail waitress with a beehive hairdo, stuck in a time warp circa 1965. Dick Miller is a riot as a salt of the earth waiter at a diner. I could go on like this, but I’ll cut it short and just mention a few more wonderful character actors who appear in After Hours: Catherine O’Hara, Will Patton, Bronson Pinchot, John Heard, and Cheech Marin.

Let’s put it this way. If you were never in New York City in the 80s, and you want to know what it was like, watch After Hours. It was exhausting, it was exciting, and it was scary, but most of all, it was pulsing with exhilarating, unruly life, just like Scorcese’s movie. After Hours is one of Scorcese’s masterpieces, every bit as much as Goodfellas or Taxi Driver.