Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette’s night of farce and coincidence is a tale in which strangeness and anxiety loom large, leading to a woozy punchline
Photograph: United Archives GmbH/AlamyPhotograph: United Archives GmbH/Alamyartin Scorsese’s 1985 screwball noir is now on rerelease. It felt at the time – and feels now – like an atypical Scorsese movie, a more generic and less auteurist project he accepted from its producer-star Griffin Dunne while progress on his Last Temptation of Christ had temporarily stalled.
It is certainly a very 1980s piece of work, and at the time was regarded as part of the “yuppie disaster” genre, about well-off and conceited white-collar New Yorkers in the Reagan bull market years being punished for their smugness by winding up catastrophically in the wrong part of town. After Hours was bracketed with Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild from 1986, and Tom Wolfe’s 1987 page-turner The Bonfire of the Vanities which was dismally filmed by Brian De Palma in 1990.
Dunne plays Paul, a guy whose job is teaching Manhattan office workers how to use the software on their computer terminals. When one of his students superciliously remarks that he doesn’t really need to master this because soon he’s going to quit and start his own publishing business, Paul can hardly bear to listen, partly out of boredom and partly because this man’s discontent and yearning for something else so clearly match his own.
Marcy invites him to her place, which she shares with Kiki, a sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino; they evidently live in that most 1980s of things, a giant, bohemian and miraculously affordable loft apartment. And it is while Marcy is briefly absent, with Paul roguishly and already faintly promiscuously giving Kiki a neck massage, that we hear about his deeply weird childhood memory.
It takes almost an effort of will after the film’s quirky final sequence to realise that this isn’t a happy ending. Someone has died here, a death which was at least partly Paul’s fault – although he can’t really be blamed for it – and this dead person is entirely forgotten while Scorsese mischievously redirects our attention to Paul’s own absurd pseudo-victimhood.
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