AFTER HOURS

An author turns to a cherished movie to help him deal with sorrow.

All cinephiles can identify movies that had an enduring influence on their lives. For Tanzer, one of them is After Hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film about an “office drone” who goes to Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood one evening to escape his humdrum life but, through a series of mishaps and tragedies, can’t find his way home. The film, Tanzer writes, is “about grief—how it never goes away, and how we adapt to loss by simultaneously embracing it and pushing through it.” Tanzer derives added resonance from After Hours, not just because he has spent much of his life working 9 to 5—happily, in his case—but also because he remains plagued by grief over his father, who died more than 20 years ago at age 59. In this heartfelt reminiscence, Tanzer writes about the passion for movies he shared with his cinephile parents, who took him to After Hours and other art-house fare when he was young, and the ways in which that film has helped him grapple with loss. He cites many other influences, including Scorsese’s own career struggles in the early 1980s; memoirs such as Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries; and films with father-son themes, such as Running on Empty, in which a father and son barely speak one evening, yet “love suffuses the scene, and that was my father and I during high school.” Frequent digressions weaken the book: the films he and wife Debbie watched during their two years in New York City in the 1990s, complaints about not always finding time to write. But readers who are artistic types will relate to Tanzer’s statement about the motivation artists face: “The struggle to believe in ourselves. To find one’s voice. To create the work of one’s entire life,” a struggle that plagues someone like Scorsese as much as anyone else driven to create.

A heartfelt if overstuffed tribute to the author’s father and the ameliorative power of art.