Film review: After Hours (1985)

This is always described as "atypical" for a Martin Scorsese film.  I'll say - it's like some kind of Woody Allen-David Lynch Frankenstein's monster.  As Thomas said of Uncut Gems, it's "thrillingly unpleasant," in that it's just one awkward and exasperating thing after another for the hapless protagonist Paul (Griffin Dunne, whose face is seared in my brain from too-young viewings of American Werewolf in London.  He's perfect in that and this - why wasn't he a bigger star?).  The adjective "Kafkaesque" is overused, but the inexplicable and downright unfair behavior Paul faces throughout the long and exhausting night 

certainly fits the bill.  Everyone has a thin surface layer of normalcy that hides mostly raging narcissism.  The film is the darkest of black comedies, too, as the death of a character who looked like the second romantic lead of the picture is passed off very quickly for laughs.  And at one moment, late in the film, as Paul is hiding on a fire escape from a mob that's tracking him down for something he didn't do, he sees through a window nearby a wife shoot her husband repeatedly in the chest.  After taking just a beat to be aghast (at this point he has very little ghast left), Paul just mutters to himself "I'll probably get blamed for that too."

I'm not going to try to summarize the plot, because there's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing (adding to the frustration - it's not even an Odyssey, he just bounces around among the same four or so locations), and while there are repeated strange coincidences, and the ending ties up neatly to the beginning, it really is a lot of "and then..."  I will give you the opening, though, as we see Paul assist a newbie at his wordprocessing job (this film really is a time capsule of early-to-mid 80's technology, alongside a lot of indoor smoking), only to hear the newbie make it clear that this job is shit and he has no intention of staying with it.  This seems to trigger something of an existential crisis for Paul, as he wanders rather dazedly out of the (for some reason) ornate gates in front of the building, only just missing being shut in for the night.  (He will quickly have reason to heartily wish that he had been.)  He seems a bit aimless, and after kicking round his apartment a bit, he goes out to a coffee shop to read Tropic of Cancer.  

It is while he is doing this that a pretty young woman (Rosanna "not Patricia" Arquette, whom I get mixed up with Isabella Rosellini and Natasha Kinski, for some reason) comments on the book, claiming to love it.  She comes over and strikes up a conversation, in the course of which she tells him about her sculptor friend's papier-mâché bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights.  He says he'd be interested and she gives him her friend's number and leaves.  Back at his apartment, still aimless, he gives the number a call.  Turns out that the young woman (Marcy) is at the sculptor's (Kiki) place, and invites Paul over.  Despite it being nearly midnight, and the place being 40 minutes away by taxi, Paul happily agrees.

The first indication that this is not his night is that the taxi driver is a complete maniac.  This is comically conveyed by literally cartoon-level sped-up footage of the journey, as the cab weaves in and out of traffic.  And, calamity! the one $20 bill Paul has brought with him blows out of the window.  When he tries to tell the taxi driver about this, he squeals off, leaving Paul in the decidedly sketchy part of downtown that the artist's loft is in.  And when he gets to the place, only Kiki is there, a decidedly cool customer, working on her sculpture (which Paul remarks looks like a 3-D version of Munch's "Shriek") in just her bra and a skirt.  Turns out Marcy is out buying some kind of medication (which turns out to be a real McGuffin) and by the time she returns Kiki has passed out in the middle of Paul massaging her shoulders 

while telling her about a traumatic experience in a burn ward.  From there, we bounce among various women - Terri Garr's anachronistic waitress 

(who has another job in a copy store, that is weaponized against Paul), Catherine O'Hara's punky ice cream van owner/operator 

and finally a different papier-mâché sculptor who first saves and then imprisons Paul. 

(As Jami commented, what was with papier-mâché in the 80s?) There are also several barmen/Diner owners/Club doormen that pass in and out of Paul's life, as well as a sizeable portion of what is obviously the gay neighborhood of New York, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes threatening.  Oh, and Cheech and Chong pop up periodically as "friends" of Kiki's whom Paul thinks are thieves, and then turn out to be.  Meanwhile Paul repeatedly takes respite in various bathrooms, 

splashing water on his face as he gets more and more disheveled and wild-eyed (something Dunne certainly has the eyes for), and I felt his pain, as watching the movie really makes you feel like it's the middle of the night and you just really want to get home.

Will Paul get home?  Will he avoid the angry mob?  Will Tom, who was so kind to him, find out that it's sort of Paul's fault that his girlfriend is dead?  Pay attention for not one but two little snit-fits from Paul about papier-mâché bagel paperweights.  Honestly, there's no pleasing some people.  Verdict: why aren't all Scorsese films like this?