After Hours Review

 This passed week I sat down to watch a peculiar movie from one of the most famous directors of all time, which wasn't exactly the same style of his other films. Martin Scorsese's After Hours is a fever dream if I've ever seen one, but it was a lot to sit with just because it was such a different narrative when compared to Scorsese's usual crime-thrillers. The plot follows a simple man named Paul, who is a word processor. Truly the most boring job was found to encapsulate the life of a working class American. I immediately felt the unfulfilled personality of the protagonist through two distinct moments in the first couple minutes of the film. The first was a shot in which he walks out the gate of his work building, just before two men close it shut. The shot is symmetrical and pleasant to look at, but it also just fits the existential dilemma of having an unfulfilling life with a repetitive job. The second, is the scene that kicks off the bulk of the plot, where he sits in a restaurant by himself and reads a book alone. 

In that scene, when Marcy is introduced, the pacing starts picking up a lot. Everything becomes very important, which I especially love, because when details are payed off it feels like, as an audience member, I'm getting rewarded for my good attention. Themes, details, and objects overlap as Paul finds himself making more mistakes and running into weirder and weirder people. Things like burn victims, skull symbols, and familiar character names show up over and over again. Once this was more clearly happening, halfway through the film, I began to make connections in my head to other pieces of media that explored the same themes in a similar way. Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Gadot came to mind, as that plot revolves around two characters stuck in a state of strange, manic time loops. Detail in that play is also very important, and among the madness, there is profound truth in what the characters are saying. For this reason I started looking for these bits of truth when examining Paul and what was happening to him. What I personally found, was that there was a great deal of detail from what he was experiencing that was that profound, deep realization, but there was also a lot of entertainment value from putting him in the most random situations imaginable. It is the healthy medium that makes a thought provoking and entertaining film. I tried looking up connections between the two pieces of work, but it seems that no one online has felt that the two are very comparable.

At the end there is a callback to the shot that stuck out to me at the beginning of the film, and I instantly understood why it stood out to me the way that it did. The madness is over and Paul is back at work, but the idea of a time loop in which Paul lives out his days in this manner is still just as prevalent. It was refreshing to see a Scorsese movie that was laid out in this way and it has become one of my favorites of his. The Departed is one of my favorite movies of all time, so that is definitely still my favorite from him, but I'd rate After Hours an 8/10. It's definitely something I want to revisit, and keep on pondering just because it has a commanding presence that makes you sit with it.