After my semi-success with The King of Comedy, I decided to give another Martin Scorsese black comedy a shot. In a way, it's the opposite: Where the former bothered and discouraged the director, the latter was just the pick-me-up he needed after his initial failure to launch The Last Temptation of Christ. It must have been especially rewarding to writer Joseph Minion, who had never sold a feature script before.
Paul (Griffin Dunne) leads a dull existence as a word processor, until he happens to meet and bond with the attractive Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). He decides to meet her again at her home in SoHo, a long cab ride from his place. His misfortune begins on that ride when his only paper money flies out the window (remember, there were no ATMs in those days) and mounts as he learns more about Marcy than he wanted to know. For the rest of the night/movie, he just wants to go home, but the obstacles keep piling on, eventually to dangerous levels. Way to make a dull existence look good.
AH gets off to an extraordinarily slow start. It takes many minutes even to come across as a comedy, a thriller, or much of anything else. Had I gone in uninformed, I might have suspected a light romantic drama. Marcy's story is more tragic than funny unless you have a pitch-dark sense of humor. Perhaps I should be thankful that she checks out of the story in the first act, leaving us with largely quirky characters who wouldn't look out of place in a Coen Brothers flick.
Who are they? Well, the familiar cast includes Linda Fiorentino as an immodest punk sculptor, Teri Garr as a waitress with her own desperation to escape, the late John Heard as a troubled bartender, Catherine O'Hara as an ice cream vendor with anger issues, and Cheech and Chong as prolific burglars who disagree on what's valuable. (Also a gratuitous gay couple, but I can't tell who plays them.) Now that I think about it, most of these characters don't have much better a night than Paul. It's just that he gets the largest number of issues to our knowledge.
For that matter, Paul isn't necessarily the most virtuous sufferer on screen. He makes several moves I wouldn't approve, and of course they usually come back to bite him. On the whole, I'd say he's like a typical Ben Stiller role: just enough of a jerk to cut my sympathy in half and not obliterate it altogether.
The other way that the film feels like a comedy is a buildup of contrived coincidences. Details have a way of returning to relevance, as when characters pop back into Paul's life, forming something like narrative bookends. Sometimes it freaks Paul out. Small wonder he shouts to the heavens near the end. It's kinda like a one-hero version of The Out-of-Towners, only more damning to one particular neighborhood than New York City as a whole.
Despite this perverse organized quality, I was not surprised to learn from the accompanying featurette that the makers stewed a lot over how to finish the story. One ending they almost ran with (basically cutting the final result short) would have been too creepy. Another would have been mind-blowingly screwy even for an R-rated comedy. They chose rightly.
On the subject of what could have been, I must reflect on how close Tim Burton came to directing it. I can't promise that it would have been better -- he was approached before Pee-wee's Big Adventure, after all -- but it surely would have toned down some aspects and played up others. What would it mean for Burton's career trajectory? Meanwhile, at what point would Scorsese recover, if ever?
The featurette indicates that they put a lot more care into certain moments than I'd guessed. For example, for a scene where Paul runs into a building to hide, Dunne actually went to a bar a few blocks away, announced that drinks were on him, and ran out without paying. (The studio paid afterward.) Now that's method acting. He does a lot of full-speed running on screen as well, including at least one long shot. Also, someone tosses keys off a roof to Paul, who wisely steps out of the way; while simple in concept, the tricky camera setup came awfully close to killing Dunne, so everyone except him agreed not to try it again.
Once again, I feel like Scorsese doesn't really do comedy; he does oddball drama-thrillers with comedic elements. In that light, I find AH passable.
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