When it comes to 1980s comedies about urban anxiety, I prefer this Ron Howard lark to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Partly this is due to the manic brio of Michael Keaton in his feature debut, but it’s also the fact that the movie—written by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—has a better control of comic pacing and energy. Not all the jokes land (and some are problematically dated), but an awful lot of them do, with exactly the right timing and intensity. (There’s a bit involving a passive-aggressive, saxophone-playing panhandler on a grimy New York City subway car that’s just perfect.) The story follows two employees at the city morgue—Henry Winkler’s tightly wound rule-follower and Keaton’s loose-cannon “idea man”—who begin running a network of call girls out of their office after Winkler’s neighbor (Shelley Long) loses her pimp and seeks a new setup. Winkler has surprising charm and Long, just about to break big on television’s Cheers, gives her sex-worker character a savvy dignity. In many ways, Night Shift functions as a pro-labor movie (the women get “pension and profit-sharing plans”). This is Keaton’s show, however, even if—as in Beetlejuice a few years later—he doesn’t show up until well into the film and is essentially a supporting character. His Bill Blazejowski is sweet at heart, but can’t stop blurting out every thought that comes into his head—even when the thoughts come in quick succession and aren’t necessarily related to each other. (His epiphany over tuna fish sandwiches is beautiful to behold.) It’s as if there’s an electric current running through Bill’s body—he’s constantly bouncing or bobbing—and the voltage has to be released somewhere, usually via his mouth. Night Shift loses steam in its last third—the Winkler-Long romance feels obligatory—but the movie wisely brings Keaton back for the chaotic climax. By the final scene, the trio seems to leave their characters behind and instead feed off their combined comic energy simply as performers. You leave Night Shift wanting to watch them in just about anything.
(8/31/2024)
