A few weeks ago Rolando, Robert and David and I all met for lunch and as we're a movie-savvy bunch the conversation naturally turned to our favorites. And one by one we each agreed that Martin Scorsese's After Hours was one we really liked. But after seeing it a couple times in late 1986, would it still hold up 23 years later?
Initially I was drawn to the movie because Teri Garr was in it. I enjoyed Garr as the Disbelieving Wife in Close Encounters and then as the Disbelieving Girlfriend in Tootsie. I always felt Garr's pain in these movies, she's always kind of outside the extraordinary events going on around her and her characters are like us, doing the best we can in trying times.
In After Hours she has a supporting role as a quirky waitress who falls for the main character, a computer programmer named Paul Hackett as played by Griffin Dunne. Dunne plays exasperation well and given the number of oddballs he encounters in the span of the movie, he gets the opportunity to get a good workout.
The story is pretty dark, Paul, meets a girl, Marcy (played by Rosanna Arquette) in a diner and eventually arranges a sex date with her at her loft in SoHo. He loses his money on the way and she turns out to be a nightmare, he leaves while she's out of the room and then it begins to rain. I love these kind of stories where circumstances pile up and start to roll out of control. After Hours though, is abit darker than my all time favorite in this genre, What's Up Doc? and less family friendly than 1985's Adventure's In Babysitting which also employs this storytelling technique.
For me, the fun of its first viewing is that I was going to college in London at the time and New York seemed so exotic especially through the eyes of this movie. Seeing it so many years later reminded me of my first feelings for it, like seeing your first love again and being reminded why it was you fell for them in the first place. The movie has wacky hijinks, good lines and memorable characters, but it’s the heart, the lesson Paul learns about living life not by staying safe in his uptown apartment, but by diving into the deep end. It’s only when he actually wants to live a real life, that he actually does.
And that’s pretty good lesson to learn whether it’s 1986 or 2009.