After Hours (1985) review

This is a strange little film. It's listed as a comedy but it's barely funny to me. It's also unusual for a Scorsese movie because there's no Robert De Niro or Leonardo Di Caprio, no organized crime, no pretentious period piece background, very little violence and no use of the word fuck. I'm not a big Scorsese fan so I like that this film is unique in his filmography. The cast is impressive too. Teri Garr, John Heard, Catherine O'Hara, Linda Fiorentino and even Cheech and Chong oddly show up.

Griffin Dune plays Paul a guy stuck in a boring word processor job. He meets a mysterious, unstable girl name Marcy play wonderfully by the alluring and beautiful (at that time, lol, not now) Rosanna Arquette. I like how you think that movie is going to follow a typical romantic comedy type film but then the film quickly becomes unpredictable, dark and labyrinthine. I also like how everything happens in one night.

Paul take a cab ride to Marcy's loft and his money flies out the car window, which sets up a series of unfortunate events. He meets Marcy's roommate, a sculptor named Kiki, who is creating some Edvard Munch type of papier mache thing. He gives Kiki a massage and tells her a story about being a kid in a hospital blindfolded so that he wouldn't see the burn victims in the room he was recuperating in. These little details seem insignificant but they give clues to things that happen later. For instance, when Marcy arrives at the loft he finds a book about burn victims. He starts believing that maybe her body is burned and it makes him uncomfortable.

Maybe my favorite moment in the film is when the camera does this cool zoom on Marcy's face. There's a bright light behind her as she glamorously winks. I like that sort of Hollywood magic. The cinematographer was very talented Michael Ballhaus and photography really gives the movie a big boost. I love all the little camera tricks he uses and vivid colors.

Paul starts to discover that Marcy is a troubled girl who is playing games with him and already has a husband. He looses his temper and leaves only to find himself in another strange situation at bar across the street. The bar owner wants to help Paul but asks him to go to his apartment to get a key to the cash register. He gets it, accidentally floods the bar owners bathroom and then returns to find the bar closed. This then leads him back to the loft where he finds Marcy dead from an overdose. Paul examines her body and discovers, strangely, that she wasn't burned at all and the book was just coincidental.

Much of the energy of the film was from Rosanna Arquette's performance and without her the movie looses some momentum. I think the only funny moment in the film is when Paul puts signs around the Marcy's loft that say "dead person" with an arrow to show the paramedics where her body is. After this he goes further down the rabbit hole as he's desperately trying to get home but it's not as interesting to me.

There's a lot of symbolism relating to "The Wizard of Oz" and Greek mythology. Most of it honestly went over my head. I watched a youtube video analyzing some of it and it was interesting. Scorsese described the film's screenplay as "like a Chinese puzzle". I kinda disagree because the film isn't confusing or even challenging. It's just unusual. I like how some things at the end tie in with things mentioned earlier. Like how at the end Paul is stuck in a papier mache sculpture to avoid being caught by an angry mob.

The film ends abruptly with Paul breaking out of his papier mache encasing when he lands on the street in front of the office building he works in. It's a ridiculous moment but the film is surreal so it doesn't matter. The last scene is him back at his desk to continue his monotonous clerical life. I'm not sure what the take away from the film is except that maybe now Paul is content and even accepts his lot in life as a word processor.

It's worth watching, otherwise I wouldn't have reviewed it, because it's a departure from Scorsese's films. It's not a favorite film of mine but it's a unique movie, it's well constructed and has some good moments. I'll watch this over "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull" or the ultimate snoozefest "The Age of Innocence" any day. It's almost like "Adventures in Babysitting" for the art house cinema crowd.