‘Dark’ Interpretation

It doesn’t open until late August, but already the James Foley-directed “After Dark, My Sweet” has taken a thrashing in the pages of the Village Voice--for allegedly playing to gay bashing.

In a piece on “the new film noir,” writer Gary Indiana castigates a sequence in which an effeminate, seemingly gay doctor is “predictably rewarded by a fatal beating” after taking a special interest in a hunky young drifter named Collie (played by Jason Patric). Further, Indiana claims the doctor character wasn’t even in the original source material, a typically murky Jim Thompson novel.

Foley (“At Close Range”) calls Indiana’s interpretation “ludicrous and absurd,” insisting that the character is in the novel, while his sexual preference is unclear. So is his reason for befriending Patric.

“The whole film questions motivations--and everyone’s relationship to one another,” says Foley, who made the $5 million movie for Avenue Pictures. “It’s about the mystery, the ambiguity and the complexity of human nature.

In fact, Foley stresses, all the central characters are ambiguous--including Collie, and the mysterious pair (Rachel Ward, Bruce Dern) with whom he becomes involved in a kidnap scheme.

Foley and actor George Dickerson, who plays Doc, “read the book, and decided the doctor’s inner life was up for interpretation,” the director says.

“What I did with the film, for better or for worse, was to be extremely literal with the book,” Foley says. “I’ll bet 90% of every word of dialogue is right from the book, verbatim. If someone senses any homoerotic yearnings on the part of the doctor for Collie, they should attribute them to Thompson.”