I haven’t seen Martin Scorcese’s After Hours since it came out in 1985 and I was a 21-year-old who had never been to New York. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time in Manhattan and have met plenty of strange characters after midnight, so I get the movie in ways I didn’t before.
For example, I now get the joke about New Yorkers seeing neighborhoods outside of their homes and workplaces as mystifying, and often terrifying, places. I loved the shots of street signs near the end of the film, showing Griffin Dunne’s progress from SoHo to Midtown. When I lived on 180st Street, I often had the experience of watching the numbered streets go up, from the window of a cab or subway train, and feeling that I was inching ever closer to the comfort of my bed. Another favorite After Hours image was the Mr. Softee ice cream truck, turned sinister when lit by street lamps instead of the noontime sun.
But … I still didn’t enjoy the film very much. Dunne’s character, Paul Hackett, was too passive to be interesting. There were questionable decisions with bad repercussions in After Hours, but I felt they were all made by Scorcese, not Paul Hackett. Taking out a $20 bill in a taxicab, only to see it fly out the window on a gust of wind, doesn’t strike me as a decision that tells me anything about Paul. And when every female character in the film turns out to be dangerously insane, that tells me something about Scorcese but nothing about Paul Hackett. (But maybe I should give Scorcese some credit for the only times in my life that I’ve disliked Teri Garr and Catherine O’Hara, and both in the same 90 minutes.)
The theatricality of After Hours also turned me off, and I say this as someone who counts Glengarry Glen Ross as one of my favorite movies. Most of the cast get little moments that feel like they’re whipping out the generic monologues they use for auditions. Roseanna Arquette’s story of rape (ending with “I was asleep for most of it”) is particularly grating.
I don’t like to criticize without offering a postive counter-example, so here’s a risky decision of my own. I’ll share that I liked a film noir starring Mickey Rooney (!) called Quicksand, in which he plays an auto mechanic who pilfers $20 from his boss’s cash register – a decision that leads to a series of increasingly disastrous situations for him. (When did Andrew Jackson become a symbol of Very Bad Things?) I’m sure it wasn’t as competently made as After Hours, but throughout the film I imagined myself in Rooney’s situation, something that never happens in Scorcese’s icily dispassionate attempt as comedy.