 Starring: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard
Director: Martin Scorsese
Year Of Release: 1985
Plot: After getting off work, word processor Paul meets a girl in a coffee shop. Phoning her that night, she invites him over, which takes him to a part of New York he doesn’t know. This kicks off a succession of bizarre events, which sees Paul#s evening getting worse and worse, starting with his date going badly, through meeting a succession of neurotic women, coming across a suicide, and eventually being chased through the streets by a vigilante gang who think he’s a notorious burglar. All he wants to do is go home, but that’s easier said than done. |
After Hours won Martin Scorsese the Best Director prize at Cannes, and of the surface you can see why. It’s a film full of wonderful shots, incredibly complex and stylish camera moves, and innovative ways of showing you things. Indeed, there are a few shots that are so impressive, that it’s difficult not to just go ‘wow’. However ever since I first watched it, I’ve had the odd sensation that it’s actually a badly directed movie.
That may sound strange considering I’ve already said After Hours is incredible to look at, but ultimately it comes down to what a director is meant to be doing. A filmmaker can be as showy as they like, but if they’re not telling the story well, it isn’t good direction. In my opinion, this is where After Hours falls down, because it’s a rather confused tale that doesn’t seem to know whether it’s comedy, tragedy, drama, absurdist, surrealistic or farce, and the mix of these things never really comes together. It’s just a lot of things happening and while perfectly watchable, at the end it feels a bit pointless and slightly unsatisfactory, because it’s impossible to know what you’re meant to take away from the film.
I have to lay the blame for that at Scorsese’s door, because while he spends a lot of time finding wonderful and innovative ways to frame shots, he really doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with the story, or actually seem to care that much. He made After Hours just after one of his attempts to make The Last Temptation Of Christ collapsed, and he was feeling utterly burnt out. At the time he said After Hours reignited his love of filmmaking, but that’s the problem, it’s all about filmmaking on a technical level and not about storytelling, with the result that it looks great, but underneath it’s a bit of a mess.
Now for the bit that might sound like heresy. In my opinion, After Hours is Scorsese’s version of a Tony Scott movie. I don’t mean that it’s full of over the top action, but that it’s a clear case of style over substance. Admittedly Scorsese’s showy bits of filmmaking style in After Hours are more impressive and eye-catching than the hectic world of a Tony Scott film such as Crimson Tide or Domino, but the results are the same –a movie where even though the style is impressive, nobody’s thought about the best way to tell the story.
The question then becomes, why does Scott routinely get pilloried by critics for style over substance, while Scorsese gets Best Director at Cannes when he does something similar? Well, it’s partly down to the fact that when Scorsese does style over substance, it’s still amazing to look at, but the main reason is that while critics and intellectuals don’t like to admit it, they do have a tendency to view films in the way non-artsy fartsy film fans suspect they do. What I mean by that is that when they see the words Martin Scorsese and there’s some good looking shots direction in an otherwise flawed movie, they decide it must be a well directed movie with the problems coming from elsewhere (they normally blame the script), whereas if an overtly commercial director like Tony Scott promotes style over substance, they are the first to say it’s bad direction.
Now, I’m not suggesting here that actually Scott and Scorsese are filmmaking equals, as they’re obviously not. On his best days, Scorsese has created some of the best cinema in history, whereas Scott has just made some pretty entertaining movies. What I’m trying to highlight is that there’s often a lot of confusion over what marks a well-directed movie. A lot of the time, showy direction gets praised, even if actually detracts from the story or tries to cover up the film’s flaws. It’s also true that the judgement on whether a fill is well-directed or not often comes down more to the reputation of the director than the actual film itself.
TIM ISAAC
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