Review: After Hours (1985)

After Hours (1985)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

After Hours is not the movie I was expecting. Between its director, its cast, its '80s New York setting, and the fact that Popcorn Frights screened it the weekend before last, I expected a dark, downbeat noir thriller with horror touches, and perhaps one of Martin Scorsese's lesser films given that it came from his period in the '80s when he'd lost the approval of critics and audiences. Instead, I was surprised at just how funny the film was, albeit going in a very different, darker, more Kafkaesque direction with its humor versus what we often associate with the R-rated '80s comedies that it only superficially resembles. It's a film born from a successful filmmaker who was at a low point in his life and career, and damn well knew it, channeling all of his frustration with his struggle to get The Last Temptation of Christ made into a story of a man having the worst night of his life as everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, often in such a manner where you can't help but laugh and cringe at the same time. It's one of the darkest versions of this kind of movie to exist, don't get me wrong, but that movie is a hilarious, surreal, gut-busting comedy that I absolutely enjoyed.

Our protagonist Paul Hackett is a yuppie in Manhattan who inputs data at a firm and longs for more out of life. One night, while at a diner, he meets Marcy Franklin, a beautiful woman who tells him that her roommate Kiki Bridges is a sculptor who makes plaster-of-Paris paperweights, and leaves him her number, ostensibly in case he wants to buy one but really because she's into him. Later that night, Paul obliges and heads down to Marcy and Kiki's apartment in Soho, in what turns out to be the beginning of a series of events involving a dead body, a pair of burglars who for once weren't carrying stolen merchandise, a bartender who's lost the key to his register, a punk nightclub, a vigilante mob, and a whole lot of really weird women.

It's the kind of night that feels absolutely cursed, an experience that most of us can probably relate to even if the threat of death never came up for us the way it has for Paul by the end of this movie, and Paul's actor Griffin Dunne does a great job of selling it. Dunne plays Paul as a man bored with life, the film opening with him doing perhaps the most soul-sucking office job you can imagine. You understand from the moment you see him why he might run off into Soho in the middle of the night, simply on the promise of meeting a beautiful woman. As the film goes on, he grows to regret his decision in increasingly bewildered and desperate fashion as the city tortures him with every indignity it can throw his way and uses him as its own personal chew toy, from little things like losing a $20 bill to some outright wacky stuff, slowly but surely sinking into madness as he goes. Each new scene makes you wonder how the city is going to fuck with him this time, like an old-school point-and-click adventure game that throws all manner of increasingly bizarre obstacles in the way of what should be a simple goal. "If I want the keys to my apartment back, I've gotta go to the bartender's apartment, but there are burglars on the loose and the other people there don't know me, so they think I'm a criminal..." Given the hell he was going through at the time, it was no wonder Scorsese saw something in Joseph Minion's screenplay.

And the movie wouldn't have worked as well as it did if not for how Scorsese once again made New York the other main character. In this case, it's not a bustling metropolis, but a place in the wee hours of the morning (after hours, if you will) where the streets are deserted and the people you do meet are more likely to be the freaks and the weirdos. I can easily picture the version that Tim Burton (the director originally attached to this) might've made, and it probably would've been an inventive film in its own right, but Scorsese fuses that style with his own background as the guy who defined the image of 1970s/'80s New York on the big screen, creating a slightly askew version of his usual "gritty realism" where it feels like anything bad can happen, and not just the things you hear about in the next morning's headlines. It feels like a place that hates Paul and wants to see him suffer for the sake of its own amusement, and Scorsese, filming a New York devoid of traffic, makes the place simply feel wrong, like a maze designed for his torment.

The supporting cast, too, nails it. Being among the few people in the neighborhood who live their lives at night, they're strange even for the standards of New Yorkers, from Linda Fiorentino's kinky artist Kiki to Catherine O'Hara's stuck-in-the-'60s ice cream truck driver Gail to Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as the small-time crooks Neil and Pepe. Most importantly, however, as Paul interacts with all of them, we get perhaps the most uncanny element of this film's upside-down New York: a place where everybody seems to know each other, like a small town that just so happens to be nestled in the middle of Manhattan. People who don't treat each other as total strangers? Now that's how you know something's wrong in the Big Apple, especially if you're an outsider. It adds to the feeling that Paul's night has gone completely sideways, like something has not only gone totally wrong ever since he stepped out of his apartment into the wild world of New York's nightlife, but has been totally wrong since long before he entered the picture, like he wandered into something that by all logic shouldn't exist in the middle of the City that Never Sleeps but does so anyway. It builds to an ending that arrives suddenly, but feels like the perfect punchline for everything we just witnessed.

The Bottom Line

I was not expecting After Hours to be the movie it was, but I'm glad I got to see it. Martin Scorsese and the cast together do a great job lending a very off-kilter black comedy feel to his usual style, and I had a great time watching it.