After Hours

After Hours (1985):

This is truly a joy to experience. Martin Scorsese’s middle finger to the establishment is a standalone masterwork of youthful energy. Scorsese took it on while attempting to raise funds for The Last Temptation of Christ. However, this does not mean that After Hours is artistically compromised. Most casually disregard it as an inferior work designed to generate a commercial response so that Marty could get Last Temptation made. That inferior commercial work is The Color of Money.

There is not one unnecessary shot in After Hours. Every single moment is that of a cinematic virtuoso. The real challenge was not to make it commercial, but to see if Marty could do another down and dirty production on the streets of New York in less than 40 days. The film retains the grittiness of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver while adding a charged nightmarish atmosphere. It is this that leads many to question the validity of the narrative. It is commonly thought of as being a nightmare in the mind of Paul Hackett. Does it really matter? Absolutely not. Marty plays with all of our expectations as a film going audience. All of our previous experiences in a cinema are violated so that we are constantly kept in the dark.

There are cutaway shots, close-ups, reaction shots, and items focused on that naturally cause the audience to play close attention to them. We do this because we have been trained to for they will become important to plot later. You can chuck all of that out the window in After Hours. Marty wanted to see how far he could push the envelope of conventional cinema with a low budget standard product. The project was originally to have been directed by Tim Burton, and while the story seems tailored to his artistic sensibility the cinematic balls Marty displays here are just unbelievable.

The nightmarish quality of the film draws a comparison to Dark City. Both feature a similar protagonist caught in a city late at night and both are eventually accused of crimes they did not commit. We are never quite sure what exactly is going on and if things are hallucinatory or not. Dark City places all of this in the power of the strangers who control the human population. What makes After Hours stand out so much is the fact that the filmmaking presents this and still remains invisible.

What amazed me on this second viewing was just how omniscient the camerawork was. Marty’s genius here is never looking back as he did with Taxi Driver, but breaking new ground with his restless camera eye. Much of this may stem from the making of The King of Comedy two years before. In that film he never moved the camera at all. The master shots provided a canvas for the actors to convey a realistic menace and this coupled with the static look made for a very uncomfortable audience experience.

Before revisiting these two films, I really only liked the 70’s period of Scorsese’s work. Then again, these have the brashness of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver along with a recharged sense of the unbridled passion for the medium contained in them. If only Marty had been able to hold onto that passion.

A problem I have with filmmakers is that they often seem to lose interest in the work they produce. Marty seems to have finally gotten through Last Temptation and hold onto it sporadically.