Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: Nora Garrett
Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield
Runtime: 139 minutes
Julia Roberts’ best performance in years elevates ‘After the Hunt’
Look, you don’t turn to a Luca Guadagnino film for subtlety.
The director of tennis throuple erotica “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name,” the queer coming-of-age romance that launched Timothée Chalamet to stardom by having him become intimately acquainted with an overripe peach, could not define the word “nuance.” That predilection for narrative and emotional garishness arguably makes Guadagnino not the best person to tackle a layered campus drama, the focal point of which is a sexual assault allegation levied by a young Black female student against a white professorial lothario. A little nuance would do a story like the one that drives “After the Hunt” well.
And yet, in spite of the film’s readily apparent shortcomings, “After the Hunt” is a riveting mess thanks to a smorgasbord of meaty performances and Julia Roberts’ best, most layered performance in years. She’s beguiling as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the brink of tenure looking every bit the part, composed and calculated with her swoop of icy-blond hair, crisp blazers, and healed loafers.
She’s distant but not aloof, inaccessible without being cold in the palace of her mind, and she holds those around her in her thrall: her doting homebody husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), her louche research partner Hank (Andrew Garfield), and her ambitious PhD student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).
The cohort is perfectly poised for life-defining academic success when Maggie shows up on Alma’s stoop, rain-soaked and sobbing that Hank sexually assaulted her
The politics are loaded. Alma’s career has been defined by championing female academics in a male-dominated field; she’s worked with Hank for years who, while flirtatious, doesn’t seem to her dangerous, but she clocks the optics of siding with her white male research partner over a young Black woman. Further turning the screws on Alma is mysterious debilitating pain that leaves her retching on all fours – and reaching for a mystery bottle of pills.
Blessedly, “After the Hunt” isn’t really the he-said, she-said MeToo treatise it advertises itself to be. In the capable hands of Roberts, Edebiri, Garfield and Stuhlbarg (who here, as in Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name,” is the film’s emotional MVP), the film becomes a searing character study. It’s not that Roberts doesn’t believe Maggie; it’s that believing Maggie will force her to confront more than her research partner, something she’s kept locked in a vault.
So why, then, does “After the Hunt” insist on having its complex, interesting and empathetically fallible characters engage in didactic conversations about “performative discontent” and trigger warnings, reducing generational divides into your annoying uncle’s whiniest Facebook posts about women with septum piercings and how nobody can take a joke these days?
First-time 30-something screenwriter Nora Garrett gilds the lily of her script with these hot-button discursions, made more grating by her Millennial voice being interpreted through a Gen-X director’s eye. This too-muchness of “After the Hunt” is frustrating because the actors’ performances convey the misunderstanding and frustrations of generational divides without needing to monologue about it in a way that makes the film itself feel like a dissertation.
But Roberts carries the viewer above all the noise to something more profound, away from generational potshots to a study of the way in which a generation of women has been taught to swallow pain. That pain doesn’t disappear but festers, even as they attempt to benefit from the very patriarchal systems and abusive power structures that hurt them.
The audience doesn’t need a dissertation to grasp that with Roberts at her best on screen.
Barbara’s ranking
2.5/4 stars
