Review of After Hours (1985) by Adam W — 27 Feb 2009

The framework for the comedy - the screenwriter just throws one damned thing after another at our hero, stopping him from getting home - isn't vastly different than, say, Planes Trains and Automobiles (a better movie).

Scorsese's camera heightens everything; the script by Joseph Minion was written for film school, and it's clearly the work of a young film-lover; someone with passion for characters and development and surprising, exciting moments, but without a sense of the whole work.

Griffin Dunne is perfectly fine and looks the part (which isn't a compliment) but he's no De Niro. It develops into the old Hitchcockian innocent-man-wrongly-accused routine, without much cohesion.

And yet it really does work as an entertainment, and follows a nightmare logic. The style is wonderful, with editing and camera work that suggest what Scorsese did stylistically with Goodfellas. It's what is called 'pure filmmaking' - which too often means 'empty filmmaking,' and the movie doesn't leave you with.

.. well, with anything really. The succession of women that the hero, Paul, meets are terrific; particularly Rosanna Arquette, whose little comic monologue about a Wizard of Oz-obsessed lover is the high point of the movie.

New York, New York is an entertaining failure; this is a troubling success.