This movie has a very simple moral: if, like tyro Word Processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), you are young, lonely, naive and a resident of Manhattan, you must learn to live with the fact that the only safe way to pass your evenings is at home, dozily watching television.
Above all, you must not permit yourself to be picked up in hash houses by girls like Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). Even though she is pretty. Even though she claims to share your interest in the life and work of Henry Miller. For if she succeeds in luring you southward to the exotically furnished SoHo loft she shares with an artist (Linda Fiorentino, who is also exotically furnished), the chances are excellent that you will shortly find yourself racing penniless through a rainstorm, trying to cope with a suicide attempt and a subway-fare increase, the consequences of a broken cash register at distracted John Heard's Terminal Bar and a cocktail waitress (Teri Garr) who is woeful in her work and sleeps in a bed surrounded by rattraps. But that is only the beginning of Paul's After Hours adventures. He has yet to escape a Mohawk haircut at the Cafe Berlin and taking the rap for a series of burglaries perpetrated by a pair of thieves (Cheech and Chong) who have George Segal the sculptor mixed up with George Segal the actor. And this says nothing about the lynch mob led by a lady driving a Mister Softee truck (Catherine O'Hara) that blames him for the thieves' depredations. Or about Paul's only means of avoiding their wrath, which is to permit a demented sculptor (Verna Bloom) to plaster-cast his entire quaking self. Oh, well, if you can't be an artist, might as well be a work of art.
At a certain highly enjoyable level, After Hours is the year's best shaggy- dog story. But it is also a subtle exercise in comedic and cinematic stylization by Director Martin Scorsese. In films as varied as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, he has established himself as our leading poet-anthropologist of the contemporary urban landscape, an artist with a special feeling for the near psychopathic outsider, battering brutally but ineptly on the doors of bourgeois normality. In this movie, working on a $3.5 million shoestring, he has cunningly reversed himself. For Joseph Minion's script casts a representative of normality as the outsider, the avant-garde's lunatic fringe as the insiders. They may keep weird hours, embrace extraordinary life-styles and befuddling living arrangements, but they are a community. All the characters Paul thinks he is encountering at random turn out to be related in curious and startling ways. The random events through which he moves form a kind of rebus, telling him, "Keep out, square." And yet, of course, a great city's artists are the keepers of its deepest mysteries, and every citizen of spirit has risked the kind of embarrassing dislocation Paul experiences in order to taste them.
Scorsese has told his tale at a pace just a little fizzier than the merely lifelike, encouraged his cameraman Michael Ballhaus to light it one notch brighter than reality, one notch darker than fantasy. His splendid actors never pause to explain their strange behavior. The result is a delirious and challeng- ing comedy, a postmodern Ulysses in Nighttown.