Griffin Dunne's pet script (he didn't write it, he just wanted to do it) had been passed around forever and, through a series of acquaintances, landed in the hands of Martin Scorsese. Marty had just seen King of Comedy fall through the earth and his first attempt at Last Temptation kicked out the studio door. This looked like money. It was the mid-'80s and cokey crazy was working as well as the teen empire. Movies for those of voting age and up were popping like mushrooms around the time. These days it's a genre called the yuppie nightmare cycle. Desperately Seeking Susan and Something Wild cast rising stars in comedies that could go south or west as long as they smashed a young urban professional against a loopy femme fatale. Susan had two of them including a major pop star. After Hours had five.
It flopped. After the big no show it was injected into the art houses where it did better over a longer time and was quietly absorbed into the mud of the cinema gutter as forces like The Coens and Stephen Soderberg rose and got to work. So what's wrong with it?
First, Griffin Dunne's empathy card starts fading from the café scene in which we cannot believe that Rosanna Arquette would pick him up. Also, Linda Fiorentino's sassy boho artist feels phoned in and the papier mache piece she's working on looks like a year twelve goth kid's project. The taxi ride from his familiar territory to the wiles of the west end of Manhattan is done cranked so it looks like it was shot as a speeding car in a Jerry Lewis movie. The punk club is pure passe try hard unless it's meant to be a yuppie version of one. Look, there's a lot of good moments and observations and the turns of Terri Garr and Rosanna Arquette shine, but the whole thing feels tone deaf.
Trying to care for Dunne's horny creep who tries to pass as an average guy will never work. We can laugh at the uber cool goof artist or feel sympathy for Arquette, recognise the '60s casualty of Terri Garr's character and find a lot of the frustration scenes anxious. But we are supposed to want Paul to make it back to his flat and lick his wounds and I, through more than a few views, have never been compelled to care about him.
This is from Martin Scorsese whose grip on how to make awkwardness and threat hilarious puts him up with the masters of Russian literature (read some and you'll get the weight of that). He who drew both intense eerieness and clumsy naivete from De Niro in Taxi Driver was surely well suggested as the perfect fit for this feast of such moments. Perhaps it's a problem of concentration. While he's so good at finding the horror of the everyday and the laugh in physical threat, when he's only meant to do black comedy or dark farce, he pushes it so far it only works as over egged.
I'm going to admit something that I don't have to: my first viewing of this was a bad experience. I went with a couple of friends to a screening at the long lamented Trak in Toorak. They were down from Brisbane and we were cramming things in. We trammed from The Quiet Earth at the Valhalla to Toorak for After Hours, Scorsese fans all. The Trak was an arthouse, mainstream second run, classics and contemporary indy. If you went there you knew the director's name and reputation. After Hours had been billed as Marty's whacky fun fest. The audience was plummy and comfy, the very yuppies that the genre was aiming at. They tittered at almost every line, even transitional or expositional moments which didn't try for laughs. Soon, everything was like the funniest moment of comedy any of them had ever witnessed. Imagine a Friday the 13th sequel in which everyone screams at every single kill and every scene, even the sex, for the entire running time. They had paid for a whacky fun fest from Scorsese and by the Lord Harry they were going to get it. I was shrivelling from the embarrassment of it, fearing the judgement of my northern sophisticates. We left in silence, even getting a cab in grasping flight.
Horrible but every time I've seen it since the only improvements I can find are in lines and moments that those screeching laughs and belly thunder had covered. Increasingly, it has played as a failure for me, over earnest in its attempt to be light and sharp. It's why I delayed watching Shutter Island because, as a horror fan, I didn't want him to bugger that up, too (he did). Scorsese still had greatness to come. He finally did make The Last Temptation of Christ and it's a masterpiece. Goodfellas reaches great heights and is still untarnished by its boring younger sibling Casino (or its embarrassing grandchild The Irishman). At some point he might have decided that a good paycheck and a reputation just felt better and was happy enough riding on the legend.
I'll always look out for him in cinema documentaries but the films since 1990 have mostly been well made and bland (there are exceptions but those are few). He'd been such a god at Uni, we knew his dialogue by heart. From the time I saw Taxi Driver on a Steenbeck editing desk I was completely hooked. We bent the knee for all of them and felt we'd found a cinemaster for our generation (even though he counts as the previous one) some we loved, others we forgave. After Hours was the first one I forgot.
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