There's Tarantino film bros and Marvel super fans, but me? I worship at the altar of Marty Scorsese. If one could walk the walls of my favorite memories of cinema they would hear Tony Bennett's Rags to Riches playing to a young Henry Hill doing gangster chores and Donovan's Atlantis blasting in the bar as they kill Billy Batts. Goodfellas is the best movie made since the 70s, an operatic and violent comedy that remains the perfect gangster flick. Marty is one of the only directors who survived the transition from New Hollywood renegades to studio darlings while still delivering formally expressive profound films like Silence and Killers of the Flower Moon. So when I heard that his 80s cult classic After Hours was playing in downtown Manhattan, I had to go.
The premise is simple enough. It's about a guy having the worst night of his life. After an encounter with a woman in a café, a mild-mannered word processor named Paul Hackett is plunged into a nightmarish odyssey to escape Soho. Paul's evening spirals out of control in a series of increasingly bizarre and absurd events: he massages an eccentric sculptor, he's captured by leather punks at the Club Berlin, and he's hunted through night streets by an angry mob and a Mister Softee ice cream truck. It's a frantic quest, bubbling up from the mind of Columbia screenwriter John Minion.
Minion is an interesting fellow. He wrote a script that begins with Renaissance hellscape painter Hieronymus Bosch in an airport bar. He directed a 1930s comedy called Daddy' s Boys produced by the late legendary Roger Corman. On his blog — a Tumblr-esque stream of consciousness of Cassavetes and Altman GIFs, a pictures of a (his?) tattoo, a Charles Bukowski quote, and other cinéaste paraphernalia — Minion leaves a trail of little media nuggets in the margins and between the paragraphs: links to songs, snippets of indie films, paintings. Minion is clearly a prolific multi-media guy with a sense of taste and style.
A story from this eccentric New York writer and the formal command of Marty seems like a match made in heaven. Unfortunately when I left the theater I found myself agreeing with Pauline Kael that After Hours is an external movie about an internal state of mind. There's a sense of speed and technics but no vision. Scorsese and Minion don't give us a take or an orientation on what we're seeing; they just whip us around different locations while hamming up the repetitive joke of a neurotic guy who has to get back uptown.
Compare this to Keith McNally’s End of the Night (1990) five years later where McNally (despite lacking Scorsese’s mastery of technique) shows us slices of New York City life while having his protagonist comment on them and become changed by them. The world and the hero are symbiotic. We the audience see the world through his eyes, with his fears and reservations.
In End of the Night, the protagonist goes to a club looking for a girl and we're thrown into a new world of underground house music and downtown punks. We see the grimy all-night cafeterias with an indigenous eye. We hear their music and meet their eccentrics with a sense of discovery and authenticity.
In After Hours, those same spaces — diners and clubs — are shown only in the mode of caricature. The artists are always crazy and out of place (either forcibly shaving Paul’s head in the club or launching crusades), and the diners and downtown streets are always empty and sterile, clearly the product of a set and not a lived-in city that never sleeps.
In fairness, After Hours is going more for absurd jokes than for anthropology. This is why it is often described as a Kafka-esque film; it has the logic of a dream, bizarre and discontinued. When Paul asks a subway attendant if he can let him into the subway despite him lacking the fare, they have a funny back and forth:
Most of the humor resides in Paul being an innocent man framed for a crime he didn't commit. “I’ll probably get blamed for that" becomes one of his catchphrases as he runs between various downtown bars and apartments trying to evade a mob of veritable torches and pitchforks. There's a Woody Allen-esque neurotic victimhood that is quite likable in Paul. But he is separate from the world, like a comedic omniscient observer, and this detachment makes it so that Paul is never changed by the world of the film. Thus, the journey grows repetitive.
Roger Ebert agreed that Scorsese and Minion don't have a take on, or an orientation towards, the world they've created. In his review he wrote, "It lacks, as nearly as I can determine, a lesson or message, and is content to show the hero facing a series of interlocking challenges to his safety and sanity." The difference is Ebert seemed to find that a virtue for After Hours. For me, by the time Paul gets to the third stranger’s apartment and give the same speech about how he has to get home to another cartoonish listener, I was just wishing the whole ordeal was over. Why are we still here? When does it end? What's the point!
In Memento (2000), a comparatively “repetitive” film, Nolan avoids this by making his protagonist learn from each interaction, slowly piecing together a puzzle that allows his hero to find his way out. Each subsequent scene has meaning because it might contain the key to ending the protagonist's nightmare.
Another way to say this is Robert Mckee’s rule in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting of giving every scene a polarity shift or scene turn: “a scene is an action through conflict that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance… If the value-charged condition of the character’s life stays unchanged from one end of a scene to the other, nothing meaningful happens.”
If Minion and Scorsese had their world change Paul with a "degree of perceptible significance," each new scene in After Hours would have a sense of progression. As it stands, our protagonist has a headache and we're stuck in narrative quicksand. And in the end Paul winds up in the same seat back in his office as a word processor; we've just gone through a lot of stress to get here.
But maybe I'm being a bit harsh. There are a lot of fun zany visual jokes. And if you can look past the narrative hang ups, After Hours has panache. Scorsese said about the movie, "I thought it would be interesting to see if I could go back and do something in a very fast way. All style. An exercise completely in style." And boy does he deliver. When Paul comes out of the bathroom, a musical dolly pan reveals his follower Teri Garr across the room with a dramatic focus shift. In a scene where Paul is running down the street, they lacked the time and money to build dolly tracks to have the camera follow him, so instead they had him run in a wide circle and trick the audience into thinking he was running down the street. It's still worth a watch for two reasons: (1) to hear John Minion's jokes about an absurd 1980s New York downtown, with all the time capsule details for today, and (2) to see how Scorsese has evolved from the technique shooter to the master of narrative who co-wrote a two-and-a-half hour epic in Goodfellas that never skipped a beat and always engaged our sense of “story.”
Disagree with my take? Think After Hours is perfect and that I'm insufficiently worshipping the god of cinema Marty? Let me know: milesvstephenson@gmail.com
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