Tuesday, November 3, 2009

After Hours

After Hours (1985), sandwiched as it is between the more successful films The King of Comedy (1982) and The Color of Money (1986), is an oft-overlooked gem from legendary director Martin Scorsese. As he has so many times throughout his long career, Scorsese returns here to his old stomping grounds with another tale from the Big Apple, this time mining it for black comedy.

The script from rookie screenwriter Joseph Minion is a triumph: complicated, but smooth and never forced. He keeps all the plot point balls up in the air (and there are quite a few) until the very last moment, and only then does he let them fall into place. Minion and Scorsese succeed in giving us a portrait of NYC in the waning of the 1980s: a post-punk wasteland of the scary, the gritty, and especially, the crazy. There are, of course, undercurrents of the age-old uptown/downtown dichotomy and the class distinctions underpinned by such a comparison. Scorsese has touched on such broad social commentary in previous films such as Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), but After Hours represents his most comprehensive analysis. Scorsese and Minion also explore the changing face of employment at the time, a transition to more soulless, computer-driven cubicle desk jobs, rendering After Hours a bleaker and far more subtle take than Mike Judge's classic Office Space (1999).

Social commentary notwithstanding, Scorsese largely eschews his political slant here in favor of the more personal. At its core, this film is an extended character study, not of our ostensible lead (Griffin Dunne), but of the city itself: Soho, the wee hours of a night much like any other night, filled with suicides, serial burglars, vigilante mobs, tortured artists, and lonely waitresses.

Uptown office word-cruncher Paul Hackett (Dunne) takes up the offer of a mysterious coffee shop acquaintance (Rosanna Arquette) to join her at her friend's (Linda Fiorentino) Soho loft in the early hours of the morning. Thinking it'll be an easy score, Paul readily agrees, and heads downtown with high hopes. But things take an irreversible turn for the worse when Paul loses all his money in the cab downtown. Furthermore, Paul's "date" with Marcy does not go at all as he planned after she unloads a mountain of emotional baggage. Eager to get away from Marcy and her weirdly kinky sculptress friend, Paul takes the first opportunity to bolt into the Soho night. Problem is, he's got no dough to get home. Paul spends the rest of the night bouncing around Soho, desperately trying to get home, but landing himself in the middle of an epic string of bad luck that plummets him into a surreal NYC nightmare.

The performances in After Hours are all superb. I'd expect nothing less from a film helmed by Scorsese. Griffin Dunne leads the way with a tight-wire act between composure and utter despair, maintaining a baseline of cool calm, but swinging randomly and wildly toward full-blown paranoid apoplexy in the face of the night's meltdown and very real threat of imprisonment or death. Joining Arquette and Fiorentino in a solid supporting cast are John Heard, Catherine O'Hara, and Teri Garr. The cast is rounded out by hilarious cameo appearances by Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as a very CheechandChong-ish pair of petty thieves.

If you've ever wondered just how wrong a single night can go, Scorsese gives us a pretty good idea, with a little help from influences as far flung as Franz Kafka, John Landis, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (if Hopper had been on a coke and booze bender at the time of painting).

Storyline & plot: 10/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Music & mood: 7/10
Performances: 9/10

The Reverend says: 9/10

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