It will be difficult to write about 1985’s After Hours without spoiling anything. By that, I don’t just mean ruining the ending for those who haven’t seen it yet. I mean any of the surprises in it, while are plentiful and begin almost immediately.
The safest summary I can provide is Griffin Dunne plays an office drone who experiences a bizarre night in Soho, stumbling from one unexpected situation to the next. Almost everything he sees, and nearly every person he meets, will tie back to a different event or another person at a later point. If I was to try to diagram all the connections in this film, I would look like the biggest conspiracy nut in the world. If would make your typical JFK assassination obsessive look sane in comparison. Also, if you ever find yourself taking up entire walls with items connected by pushpins and string, you have made some questionable life choices.
So it is a testament to everybody involved in this production of this feature that it is almost effortless to follow. That said, it is a hair too clever and self-satisfied with its own clocklike structure, a Rube Goldberg invention seemingly designed to torture an innocent man so that a capricious deity would be entertained.
Martin Scorsese directs, during what was a low ebb in his career. Despite having Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and Raging Bull under his belt, he was persona non grata in Hollywood following the financial failure of King of Comedy. Then his first attempt at Last Temptation of Christ fell through just before shooting was about to commence. He needed to make something relatively cheaply, and quickly to prove to both the industry and himself that he still had the magic.
This is Scorsese returning to the New York he loves, though this takes place in what was frontier territory at the time. In a bonus interview on the Criterion Collection blu-ray, he talks about how weird it was to film in Soho before gentrification. There weren’t any shops. There weren’t any bars they could pop into during lulls in filming. Apparently, much of the area didn’t have electricity, which boggles my mind, as I can’t imagine a part of any city where water and power might be scarce.
All the action takes place at night, so the area is even more deserted than it would have been during the day. It is into this eerily abandoned world that a speed demon cab driver deposits Dunne. The $20 bill Dunne was going to use to pay for his fare blew out the window as the cab zigzagged through traffic in undercranked shots.
As a result of this, our protagonist doesn’t have sufficient money to get home. Even taking the subway is out of the question, as the change he has would have purchased a token only up until a couple of hours ago, as the rate just went up to $1.50. If case you haven’t guessed it already, these efforts could be described as Kafkaesque. It also feels a bit like a Beckett play.
Except Beckett was never this funny. Perhaps the biggest surprise is Scorsese would make a movie this funny, even if it is all dark humor. I would be hard-pressed to explain why some things in this made me laugh. Many of these moments are from the cracks that start to appear in Dunne’s polite demeanor. It isn’t too far from a couple of the movies John Cleese made following his Python years, where his innate British civility seems to handicap his characters as they face increasingly absurd situations.
To try to give a sensation of the movie’s bizarre humor and disorienting nature, allow me to list a few of its elements, all of which factor to some degree in the plot. Plaster-of-Paris paperweights that look like a bagel and cream cheese. A crude drawing on a bathroom wall of a man with a shark biting down on his erect member. A bed surrounded by rattraps, each illuminated by a tiny spotlight. A life-size paper mâché sculpture of a cowering, shrieking man. A bar where the price of admittance is to either have, or be willing to receive, a mohawk haircut. A Mr. Softee ice cream truck slowly leading a mob of flashlight-wielding vigilantes. Arrow signs helpfully directly one to a dead body.
While all of these play into the storyline, I suspect one’s tolerance for this weirdness will vary for each viewer. I can fully understand one person hating this movie with a passion, while another will have found their new favorite film. I was somewhere past the middle, towards loving it but finding myself an arm’s length from it at all times. It was all a bit too artificial for my tastes.
One aspect I don’t think anybody could argue is the quality of the cast. Among those appearing with Dunne are Teri Garr, Rosanne Arquette, John Heard, Verna Bloom, Catherine O’Hara, Linda Fiorentino and Dick Miller. There’s even Cheech and Chong as thieves who are very central to the plot. Who would have thought this comedy duo would be in a Scorsese picture?
Of those actors, the most noteworthy is O’Hara. What I found most interesting about her performance is she does many of the same things that would be for laughs in other films, but which are quite menacing here.
After Hours is an anomaly in Scorsese’s career. Heck, it is almost entirely unique among movies, period. There is so much content here, and it is so open to analysis and interpretation, that I suspect it could serve as a kind of Rorschach test for each viewer.
Dir: Martin Scorsese
Starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Teri Garr, John Heard
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray