I don’t generally think of Martin Scorsese when I think of screwball comedies. His movies may have humorous moments, but I think the closest to a straight-up comedy of his I’ve seen is The Wolf of Wall Street, and that had a pretty serious message behind it. But then there’s After Hours, a movie Scorsese made when a studio had suddenly cut off funding for The Last Temptation of Christ. and he had to make something and chose a movie that was very different from, well, just about everything else I’ve seen that he’s made.
Of course, it may not be much of a screwball comedy, but it sure is a dark one.
Corporate office drone Paul (Griffin Dunne) has what looks like a routine nine-to-five job. He meets a woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), gets a phone number, and decides on a lark to give her a call. She’s staying with an artist girlfriend in Soho, and during a very high-speed cab ride over, Paul loses the twenty dollars that was supposed to pay for pretty much his entire evening.
Man, twenty dollars to pay for a cab ride in New York City? And to have enough money left over to go home again? That’s something else.
Regardless, things do not go well for Paul. Marcy is not the most stable of people in certain ways, mentioning a past rape she may have slept through, a marriage to a husband in Turkey who shouts odd things during sex, a boyfriend she may or may not have broken up with, and a general uneasiness about her body that reminds Paul of a past trauma in the burn unit. He decides to get out of there by being very rude, and like an episode of Seinfeld, that one inconsiderate action avalanches into a pile of problems for Paul, ranging from sudden subway fare increases, accusations of burglary, suicides, suspected gay pick-ups, psychologically unbalanced women with stalker tendencies and artistic skill, and a near forced Mohawk cut.
Well, this certainly was different from every other thing I have ever seen from Martin Scorsese (seen briefly running a spotlight in a dance club). The plot is really tight, jumping from one thing to the other in ways that are all interconnected in ways to just make Paul’s night even worse. As character actor Dick Miller says in his brief appearance, anything can happen after hours, and for Paul, that certainly is true, and none of it is good.
Plus, this was actually a pretty impressive cast beyond Dunne and Arquette, including the likes of Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, a surprisingly punk Catherine O’Hara, and as a pair of thieves with some interesting thoughts on art, Cheech and Chong. It’s not a deep movie except in the final seconds when Paul goes back to work as if nothing happened. Sure, the implication is Paul probably didn’t learn anything and the whole thing is starting all over, but this isn’t the sort of movie to learn lessons. It’s the sort where the protagonist is probably better off just forgetting the whole thing. But for the audience? Well, that’s a different story.
Grade: B
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