40: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)

Version owned: The 2004 Warner DVD release as included in the Martin Scorsese Collection box set (the same one I pulled After Hours from).

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The child is telling a joke, his mother the only audience. It's a joke he's heard and is trying to remember, but the details aren't coming out quite right. He gets to a point, realizes he forgot something, runs back to fill in the detail. A pause, a stammer, a restatement, a change. Eventually, he arrives at a punchline, but by then the joke is obliterated, blasted out of recognizable shape by the heedless energy of the teller. His mother, his exasperated mother, evinces no response other than a grim relief that the fumbling attempt at a joke is over... so of course the child thinks she doesn't get it and heads forth to run through it again, expecting that this time she'll laugh. The mother's face crumbles into a burgeoning sob.

This joke - something about a gorilla and some testicles, if I remember correctly - is so important to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Firstly, the joke stands as a representation of realism and this film's curious relationship to it. The telling of the joke is a perfect encapsulation of Tommy, the pre-teen son of Ellen Burstyn's Alice - it's youthful loquaciousness as a verbal steamroller, awkward and oblivious and pointedly vulgar. Tommy is allowed to be unsympathetic and obnoxious to a degree that doesn't often find purchase in Hollywood, where children are often shown as precocious and/or wise beyond their years, and doing so makes him feel uncannily like an actual kid reacting to stressful circumstances. This general truth to character and circumstance revealed in small ways finds its way into every corner of the film - in the embarrassed hesitance of the first meeting between the widowed Burstyn and lounge rat Harvey Keitel, in the pastoral calm of Kris Kristofferson's ranch, in the nervous, frayed desperation of Burstyn at the end of a job hunt and the ever-weakening pronouncements about the bar's lack of a piano by the bar owner whom she's begging for a singing job. There's a thread here where Scorsese, ever the cinematic omnivore, is more or less using the structures of American melodrama to tip his cap towards Italian neo-realism, and the concentration on the economically downtrodden is part and parcel there.

Except that every little touch of realism comes with something to undermine it, to blow it up into something grand and brash. Harvey Keitel turns out to be a room-smashing monster; Kristofferson's ranch has grass rendered in eye-scorching Technicolor green; Burstyn's last stand is accompanied by a swooping fast-track zoom as she hobbles into the darkened bar. Too with the joke - the truth of the scene is a kid being a kid and telling a story while disregarding whether anyone wants to hear it, but the telling is allowed to wend so long that the realism breaks and the duration becomes its own meta-joke. This is appropriate for a sober ground-level drama frayed to bits by the fact that all its characters operate out on the far edge of their emotions. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a woman's-picture in the same way Mean Streets is a crime picture - it has the shape of the thing, but the violent, nervous rhythms juiced into it by its young, excitable director give it an electricity all its own, melodrama tiptoeing just up to the raw edge of miserablism before letting off the gas and sliding back towards less painful outcomes.

Getting to these outcomes, of course, is never easy - a lot of detours and dashed dreams have to occur before these people find their way to where they are. And there it's back to the joke again - it's a perfect microcosm of this film's idea of life as a long wait for an expected destination only to realize that destination isn't on the horizon and life is moving on whether you want it to or not, so now's the time to act. Burstyn spends the film pulling up stakes and running whenever things get sour, towards an imagined future of singing success in Northern California; the hard-fought satisfaction and wisdom of the ending comes when she doesn't run from another series of letdowns. The film finds its truth in the small gestures because the big ones are always revealed to be folly, emotional blowups that solve nothing because after the blowup you still have to exist. There's a beautiful scene near the end of the film between Burstyn and Diane Ladd where the former pours her heart out to the latter in the bathroom of the diner where they both work, and it's moving and fulfilling and helps Burstyn make her ultimate choice about where she's going to go with her life... and in the middle of it Scorsese cuts to Vera, the hapless young waitress who works with the two absent women, trying to manage a lunchtime rush all by her beleaguered self. Life goes on.

26: After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Warner Brothers as part of the Martin Scorsese Collection box set.

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice, to my recollection - once on VHS probably around 1997 or 1998 and once on HBO around 2000 or 2001. Never from this disc.

"I'll probably get blamed for that."

The thing about being at the center of a narrative is it makes everything about you, even if it really isn't. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is hiding on a fire escape from an angry mob when he peeps in a window and sees a man shot to death by an angry woman. His reaction is not one of shock but of rueful self-pity, which given the circumstances is semi-understandable - he's already been accused of at least one thing he assuredly did not do, a string of apartment burglaries, which is why there's a mob on his tail. He's having an impossibly bad evening... but the murdered man in the apartment is having a worse one.

That's a fascinating aspect of Paul's trials throughout After Hours, Martin Scorsese's hilarious and unnerving black-comic exercise in ratcheted urban paranoia: the insinuation that much of what he goes through is due to his self-absorption. His skills in reading other people and choosing who to trust are poor and only made worse by stress/exhaustion, as is his unerring ability to choose the wrong response in any situation; by the later stages of the film, he's compounding his troubles by throwing blind panicked trust at an obvious lunatic like Gail, Catherine O'Hara's bizarre and giggly ice-cream-van driver, then whining his way out of a temporary haven provided by a gay man who furtively picks him up as he's seeking refuge in a park. Before that, he'd scotched his evening with flighty raw-nerve Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) by trying to make sexual overtures on her rather than just be the conversationalist she repeatedly says she's looking for that night; further exacerbated the situation by getting snippy and cold towards her even as her emotional state visibly deteriorates; misunderstood a circular conversation with a bouncer and in doing so accidentally agreed to having his head shaved; and allowed his frustrations to boil over at Julie, a lonely, if slightly odd, waitress (Teri Garr, finding all the pathos she can in her short screen time) who was nice enough to take him in out of the rain. Paul may indeed be stuck in SoHo as a sort of purgatorial punishment, but he's had the keys to the gate within his grasp several times and not been able to see it.

Then again, maybe the universe really does just have it out for him. Both these things can be true - Paul is kind of an asshole, yet the misfortunes piled upon him seem out of proportion unless he's been fingered as karma's dumping ground for the night. Despite the connotations of my initial argument, it can only be argued that Paul is the object around which everything in After Hours orbits - especially the camera. As it zooms, drifts, roves and circles with a malevolent energy, the camera never detaches from Paul's proximity, even when he's immobile and encased in plaster. Furthermore, Scorsese throws in a number of sharp little details to signify that this isn't just stacked assholery, many of which I'd never before noticed. When Paul goes to visit Marcy, she's staying with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a conceptual artist who drafts him into helping with her latest sculpture while he waits for Marcy to return from the pharmacy. The act of doing so gets plaster on his white shirt, so Kiki lends him a black shirt with pinstripes; the swap from white to black, combined with the suggestion of prison stripes, is a clever indication of how the night will proceed. (A similar white/black contrast exists between the phone in Paul's apartment, which he uses to phone Marcy in hopes of a nice evening, and the phone in Kiki's apartment, which he uses to phone the police and report a death.) Later, in Julie's apartment, she attempts to cheer him up by dancing to the Monkees's "Last Train to Clarksville"; Paul breaks down crying just as Mickie Dolenz gets to, "...and I don't know if I'm ever coming home." Even later, he returns to Kiki's apartment in search of a $20 bill he noticed on the surface of her plaster sculpture, and right after he removes it, the flashlights of the nascent anti-burglary posse shine through onto him. The God Paul finds himself bellowing at in a moment of high dudgeon has a sick sense of humor, it seems.

Not as sick as it could have been, though - the original ending was for Paul to be trapped in limbo inside another sculpture, this one built for him by barfly/basement-dwelling resident artist June (Vera Bloom) as a disguise against the angry mob. This haven soon becomes another trap, another cosmic joke on Paul perpetuated on him by a mysterious figure who knows his name without him ever mentioning it to her. His deliverance comes at the hands of the real thieves (played by Cheech and Chong), puckish figures of anarchy who slip through a manhole and into his basement prison - literally descending into the underworld to spirit him away - and in the light of this proposed ending, Cheech's line, "A stereo is a stereo, but art is forever," sounds damned ominous. But instead, he ends up falling out of their van right in front of his office. After Hours opens with Paul training a new hire (Bronson Pinchot!), who responds that the job is, "...temporary anyway. I don't wanna be stuck here doing this for the rest of my life." Paul's response to this unintentional slight is to gaze around at everyone in the office who IS here for good, reflect on his own station and recess into himself for the evening. It closes with Paul back at his desk, having traded one nerve-jangling personal Hell for another, far more anonymous and manageable one; as though to drive that home, the camera at last breaks free of Paul and slides around taking another look at his coworkers. Is that all there is to a bad evening?