Did anyone else think that it was a little strange how easily Julie went along with Paula's plan? Maybe it was just me, but Paula was obviously unstable, therefore she would have had every motivation to do what she did to Fred Weller's character, Julie really didn't have anything to gain by it, yet she seemed to go along with it without too much resistance, just wondering what some other people's thoughts on this might be.
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I think that we are supposed to believe that Julie goes along out of a combination of (1) a drunken lack of good judgment, (2) a little bit of new found loyalty to/wanting to go along with Paula, who is acting like a friend to Julie who has no real friends and (3) a deep well of pent up anger built up for years, that has been boiling particularly rapidly for much of the day while she thought she was about to be fired. (Note her inability to be really excited/happy about the new job -- I think she's been too tense and angry all day to shift gears.)
That gets us far enough to have her agreeing/going along with an unformed plan (i.e. letting Paula invite the guy into the suite). Note that she DOESN'T hang onto the liquor bottle/club that Paula gives her (I'm using a lot of /// in this mesage for some reason. Sorry if it's annoying.)
Then once Paula has drugged the guy, the general idea of getting him out of the suite, seems somewhat reasonable. (Like most people, I suspect, when I watch these kinds of stories I like to figure out where I would have handled things better/differently. For me I think it is at this point, where I think I would have insisted that we dump him on the couch and tell him he passed out.)
After that it's bit by bit and each new step not too unreasonable.
What makes this a better movie than most of its type, is that Julie DOES stop it and doesn't let Paula just drive her down the path to a horror story. Julie calls Paula's bluff and stops it. I love her little speech about knowing Paula's type (and how they come back from their sensitive husbands and well-raised children to beg for a job and end up serving Julie coffee) -- to me this is a central point -- it is the fact that Julie does understand "the business of strangers" -- that she knows how to read people, that allows her to protect herself (whether that's what she really needs or not.)
She might have been fed up with all the crap she had to put up with her entire life. Being passed over just because she had breasts. Having her marriage go up in flames because she did not want to have children and being seen as something lesser for her choices. It seems like she's always traveling from one sales meeting to another which doesn't allow for much friend-making time. I think the final scene makes clear that she is in a small box of her creation. Mainly she's probably upset that she let this obvious unstable young woman in her life who used her and played her for a fool.
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