After Hours
Martin Scorsese (1985)
An unusual and relatively little-known Martin Scorsese film, After Hours follows The King of Comedy and precedes The Color of Money in the canon. It was made in the light of Paramount’s dropping out of production of The Last Temptation of Christ and may somewhat reflect Scorsese’s feelings of frustration about that – but not in an obvious or angry way. This story of the serial misadventures of Paul Hackett, a young IT worker, during one night in New York’s SoHo district, has alarming elements but the prevailing tone is comic verging on antic. Scorsese seems determined to have some light relief: although both The King of Comedy and After Hours can be termed black comedies, the earlier film is heavy-spirited beside this later one. No Scorsese movie before or since has had a male lead like skinny, humorous Griffin Dunne, who plays the hapless Paul. Perhaps the nearest thing to him is Zeph Michaelis, the protagonist of the nine-minute short What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?, which Scorsese made as a student, in 1963, and which BFI showed as a curtain raiser to the screening of After Hours.
Paul’s extraordinary experiences begin in a diner where he goes after work. He’s reading a Henry Miller book and a girl called Marcy strikes up a conversation with him. They share a liking for Miller and Paul is immediately attracted to Marcy, who lives with a sculptor who makes plaster of Paris paperweights in the form of cream-cheese bagels. Marcy asks Paul if he’d be interested in buying one; since he wants to see her again, he says yes and gets her number. An hour or two later, Paul is in a cab en route to the SoHo apartment building where Marcy lives when the $20 note he has to pay the fare flies out of the open car window and he’s left with less than two dollars in change. It’s an omen – the first of many things to go wrong. There are few people around in the city that never sleeps and the ones Paul encounters are oddballs or intimidating or both. The New York locations, shot by Michael Ballhaus, are naturally impregnated with darker, violent traces of earlier Scorsese films. It may be a coincidence that Paul’s long night begins with a taxi driver whom he manages to enrage; it can’t be another coincidence when, later on, he escapes from a club where the price of admission turns out to be a Mohican haircut. In spite of the abundant humour, you get anxious for Paul’s safety.
There seems to be no way out either for the hero or out of the screenplay. After Hours, written by Joseph Minion and rewritten by Scorsese, is less than a hundred minutes long but develops a Scheherazade-like quality: you get the increasing impression that Paul keeps meeting new people and getting into further difficulties as a means of Scorsese’s postponing the moment when the story has to be brought to a close that makes sense. Paul spends hours trying to get home but you feel he must end up at his workplace, where the film opened. And so he does: he’s literally dropped off (the back of a van) outside work and returns, just about in one piece, to the soulless safety of an office of computer screens and cubicles. Although this final destination feels right, you can’t help thinking Martin Scorsese has reached it because he’s run out of other places to go. Still, there are plenty of engaging moments on Paul’s journey and Griffin Dunne is very good company: he has a look of Dudley Moore crossed with Barry Manilow but soon turns into himself – becomes, in other words, a distinct screen personality. By playing straight, he’s both funny and makes you care about Paul’s plight. The supporting cast includes, among others, Rosanna Arquette (Marcy), Linda Fiorentino (the sculptor), Teri Garr (excellent, as usual), John Heard and Verna Bloom. Several characters disappear then turn up again, amusingly. The stereotyped presentations of gay men (there are several) seem crude and condescending at this distance in time. Fatal gunshots get fired at one point but they have no particular weight: they’re just one incident among many in this minor but likeable film.
3 February 2017